Snapchat Made Another Change To Your Friends' Stories & Twitter Is Not Happy
I don't know about y'all, but Snapchat really needs to stop playing these games. Just when users were starting to get used to the recent updates, the app just had to throw another change at us. These tweets about Snapchat moving friends' stories to the right is proof that no one is happy right now.
An app update is always a headache, but this one might take the cake. On May 10, Snapchat decided to switch things up again by moving users' friends' stories from the left, back to the right side of the app. In November 2017, the photo sharing app completely shook the nation when they spontaneously moved users' friends' stories to the left, which was dramatic enough. And then in February, the social media app redesigned its entire layout and placed friends' stories and snapchats in no chronological order. And now, this change, putting everything back.
As an avid Snapchatter, the February change was, without a doubt, the most frustrating change to get used to. Not only did the redesign make it harder to find my friends when I wanted to send a snap, but I was subjected to watching Snapchat stories from people who frankly, I didn't care about. It was an absolute nightmare. At least now that's ended.
Still, when will Snapchat realize you shouldn't mess with a good thing? Even though Snapchat might have used this update to move things back to app's original layout, users are still getting a little frustrated that this is yet another design change to occur over the past few months.
So why exactly did Snapchat decide to change their layout again? A member of Snapchat's communication's team tells Elite Daily by email that the changes are rolling out to the majority of iOS users, and that Snapchat is making some other changes to make it easier to users to find their friends. In the new update, snaps and chats will be in chronological order again, but they'll be in a separate feed from professional content.
This redesign was actually announced back on May 1, when founder Evan Spiegel explained in the company's Q1 earnings call that it was intended to fix the problem Snapchat had accidentally created by moving your friends' stories in the first place — namely, that it made it hard to manage.
Spiegel said,
We are now focused on optimizing the redesign based on our ongoing experimentation and learning. For example, when we separated friends’ Stories from creator Stories, we also moved them to the left side of the camera and merged them into the Chat feed. We learned that combining watching Stories and communicating with friends into the same place made it harder to optimize for both competing behaviors. We are currently rolling out an update to address this by sorting communication by recency and moving Stories from friends to the right side of the application, while maintaining the structural changes we have made around separating friends from creators and sorting friends’ Stories by relationships. The redesign created a lot of new opportunities, and we look forward to continuing our efforts to refine and improve Snapchat.
I have to be honest, since Instagram introduced stories to its design, I haven't been snapchatting nearly as much as I used to. Apparently I'm not alone in this. In February, Kylie Jenner took to Twitter to ask her fans whether they still use Snapchat. According to Jenner, she's starting to lose interest.
She wrote,
sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me... ugh this is so sad.
However, Jenner followed up her tweet with another one reassuring the app that there's still plenty of lingering love.
She wrote,
still love you tho snap ... my first love
Even though Jenner may still use the selfie sharing app, her tweet apparently cost Snapchat a pretty penny. After Jenner posted the tweet, CNN reported that Snapchat had lost $1.3 billion in stock. Ouch.
Hopefully users will warm to this change eventually, but Snapchat really needs to start nailing down exactly how they want to present their layout. In the meantime, I'll probably be complaining about this switch for a while.
Let's just hope another change isn't in our futures anytime soon.
