I love Snapchat Stories. I always have a minute's worth of video in my story. I love it because, unlike Twitter, Facebook/Instagram and the rest, I can overpost to my hearts content, and people can totally ignore it if they want to. Most of my family does the same, and its fun to see.
I can post videos of my children doing stupid things that no one cares about or wants to see but my parents and grandparents. Oh, thats another thing: when I tell people I love Snapchat, they assume "heh, for sexting?" Well, no, my whole family, including my 60 y.o. parents and 80 year old grandparent are on Snapchat and love seeing videos of my family's activities or stupid stuff we do. The barrier for whats acceptable to post is much lower, like toddlers running through the house naked and whatnot. And it goes away. (well, probably not technically, so I wouldn't post anything that you wouldn't be generally cool with accidentally getting broadcast somehow).
But most the time, I post interesting-but-uncurated little snippets throughout the day that I think are funny or odd, and I usually get a few random comments from friends and family, and its generally fun, frictionless and competition-less way to share without all the 'like' or friend quantifiers. Occasionally a post gets upgraded to twitter for broadcast.
I also initially enjoyed the city stories, where random regular people from, say, Doha or Abu Dhabi or Kuala Lumpur post videos of their daily lives. Cool to see how people live on the other side of the world. Eventually got bored with it, but cool concept.
Out of curiosity, Im not user so this might be ignorant, but why can't people ignore your posts on Twitter, Facebook/Instagram. Are you just referring to notifications ?
I do get the point of the psychological barrier and the problem of broadcasting likes, retweets, comments etc. I think some people will say "what if no one responds" then why would I put this out there, and stop them from putting out something that might be interesting.
Referring to core product, 'the feed.' I've had a terrible experience with Facebook. The more i curate, the more it seems to send me cruft from people i do not know. I started using Facebook back in 2004 when they opened up to all college students, and it was cool to friend everyone I've ever met, so that legacy certainly impacts my experience on FB.
With Twitter and Instagram's linear feed, I have to seasonally follow/unfollow people (whom i care about and want to follow!) based on the current sport season, they just had a baby, or whatever and they decide to binge post. Not just once, but for a literal season.
Now, I use them all, and they all have strengths and weaknesses, but Snapchat is the only one i really love to use. Its not a polar argument.
sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but i still don't understand how its different from going to a users profile directly on instagram or twitter, to see only what they posted.
Let's take Instagram as an example since it is a straightforward feed. If 1 person posts a picture every hour (oversharing), but everyone else posts 1/day, then I have to actively scroll past all those pics from the 1 person just to see what else I (may have) missed from everyone else.
In snapchat, I can quickly tap thru or totally ignore (never see, never spend a second messing with it) if I so choose.
I want to see posts from everyone, but one person (or a handful of people) can seriously damage the experience on Instagram type feed based platforms.
I suggest playing around with snapchat to understand why it's a fundamentally different approach to interacting. Follow some active users like DJ Khaled.
Regarding how Snapchat handles a large number of followers, I don't really know how to address. I follow 50 people, maybe 10 post daily.
Ok thanks, that makes sense. I'm just curious when snapchat has longevity like twitter, and you have hundreds of people you're following their stories, how that User experience will be different than twitter or instagram at that point. I imagine, eventually they will need a way to curate the best user stories or active user stories out of your list of hundreds.
The difference with snapchat is (as Justin notes) there's no central "stream" to worry about cluttering. If you have friend a that is prolific and friend b that only occasionally updates a's activity doesn't trample over b's.
There is a stream though, so that is the way the bulk of its users experience the product. I don't think there is a different way on Twitter to see a list of just those you follow based on whether they've tweeted in the last 24 hours.
But most the time, I post interesting-but-uncurated little snippets throughout the day that I think are funny or odd, and I usually get a few random comments from friends and family, and its generally fun, frictionless and competition-less way to share without all the 'like' or friend quantifiers. Occasionally a post gets upgraded to twitter for broadcast.
I also initially enjoyed the city stories, where random regular people from, say, Doha or Abu Dhabi or Kuala Lumpur post videos of their daily lives. Cool to see how people live on the other side of the world. Eventually got bored with it, but cool concept.