Snapchat built Stories to solve real problems: users wanted to share with everyone at once without spamming, felt judged by likes and comments, and found reverse-chronological feeds confusing. The solution removed metrics, made content disappear after 24 hours, and showed snaps in order.
Chapters
We were hearing from customers all the time, I want a send all button. It's so annoying to select everybody on my list of friends in Snapchat. If you just give me a send all button, then I can blast snaps to everybody all day long, and that'd be really great. At the same time, we were talking to people about their use of social media, and they're like, oh gosh, social media, I feel all this pressure, right? Everything I put up there is permanent all the time. It's got all these likes and comments, so there's all this judgment. So I only feel like I can put pretty and perfect things up there. I just don't like that pressure. That doesn't feel good. And so we thought that was really interesting. We dug deeper into how people were using social media. We found that one of the things they thought was really weird was that everything was in reverse chronological order in the feed. So the feed back in the day, the timeline, people posted photos, they would always find that like the end of the birthday party appeared first in the feed and then the middle and then the beginning of the party. So everything was played in reverse in the feed, which was really strange to folks. So we listened to all of that, but then we came up with something totally new and different, which were stories that were responsive to the feedback. They didn't create a send all button, but they did create a way to easily share with all of your friends without spamming them all day long. They removed public metrics. They didn't have likes and comments and things like that. To reduce pressure. They disappeared after 24 hours so that everyone could start the day fresh again the next day. And they, maybe most importantly, were in chronological order, which is the way that people have told stories since the beginning of time.
