How My Life Has Changed Since I Deleted Snapchat

This is the story of my rise and fall in the empire of Snapchat.


Why I Got Snapchat

Essentially I got Snapchat at the request of a friend (G). She's also the reason I got Instagram so you can kind of see a theme there lol. I think I got it when I was a senior in high school but didn't start using it too seriously until I got to college. Once I was in college, having Snapchat made a little more sense to me because I wasn't around my friends all the time and seeing them in person, so it was a really quick easy way to stay in touch.

I used Snapchat mainly to stay in touch with a few people via the "streak" feature which basically enslaves you to go on the app at least once a day in order to maintain your streak. Snapchat had other features like chat messaging and posting pictures to your "story" for all your friends to see the trashy stuff you're getting up to, but I really only used it to keep streaks with two or three friends and occasionally send a snap here and there to other friends.

Why I Deleted Snapchat

At first there was nothing nefarious about my usage of Snapchat. It was just another dumb social media that I barely checked. Once I got to college though, and the streaks started to get serious, I feel like I really got sucked in. Snapchat's model was smart because they create this thing that literally forces you to use their app every day, and the users think they're making the choice autonomously. When you maintain a streak, you can hit certain milestones and get dumb little rewards like badges or medals or something on your profile. I could give two rats about this reward system, but the friends I maintained streaks with cared more than I did, and I was part of their journey towards getting their badges or whatever, so I felt like I had to keep maintaining streaks or else I would let them down.

The other thing was that maintaining these streaks felt like I was maintaining these long distance friendships because we had to contact each other at least once a day, so it felt like we were connected. The thing is though I had other friends who didn't even have Snapchats that I would text from sun up to sun down, meanwhile there would be days where the Snapchat streaks consisted of nothing but one dumb picture that just said "hi" or didn't say anything at all--not a means of staying connected to each other, but just a means of staying connected to the streak.

I realized quickly that it was really pointless. My streaks with my one or two other friends had fizzled off, but my streak with G had become so long that I felt like I couldn't just cut it off.  Plus Snapchat had become our main source of communication. Sure there were the one-snap days where we were both busy and didn't really have anything to say. But then there were the days when we would send each other Snaps for hours on end about actual serious topics, or just whatever we were going through. The sad thing to me was that I could never keep any of those really meaningful conversations because by nature of the platform, they disappeared as soon as you watched them.

Despite all of that--realizing the scheme Snapchat had jipped me into, and realizing the utter insipidity of the whole platform--the biggest reason I deleted Snapchat was related to one of the app's other features: the Discover Page.

What Discover Started Out As...

When I first got Snapchat in ye old 2016 or whenever it was, the Discover Page was a, shall we say, undiscovered gold mine of marketing opportunity. I don't remember exactly, and it's hard to find published archives on this topic, but at the beginning, the Story feature was separate from the Discover feature, meaning that to view your friends stories, you went to one destination, and to access "discover" topics (which were mainly news stories, celebrity gossip, cooking shows, etc) you went to a different destination. I guess Snapchat caught on quickly that they could get more celebrities and media companies to latch onto their app if they were to intertwine the two: make it so that in order to watch what your friends were doing, you had to go to the same page where you could see what New York Times and People magazine were doing too, whether you wanted to or not.

Even that wasn't so bad at first. For a long time, your friends stories were emblazened largely across the top of the discover page, and trashy discover articles were much farther down the page and pretty easy to ignore. Of course Snapchat has a marketing team that wants to make the app money through media partners, so they were continually changing the layout to figure out how best to captivate users attention. The last update I was around for, Snapchat made it so that the discover page completely intertwined your friends stories with stories about "Demi So-and-so Frolicking on the Beach" and the "Weekly Marijuana Roundup". If I wanted to see what my sister-in-law was up to this weekend, I had to scroll past a dozen flashy tabloid-esque articles just to click on her story. Plus they'd also gotten around to monetizing these dumb articles by inserting UNSKIPPABLE ads pretty much every five minutes. Yep. The internet: what a minefield of wonder.

What Discover Started to Look Like ...

Well, you might think, this isn't a problem if you have willpower and can look past the articles. You are in control of what you choose to consume! And to an extent, you are right. I had every right not to click on pointless, time wasting, trashy, flashy, half-naked, scandalous articles. But I'm also a weakling who has no self-restraint. I get sucked in by stupid headlines and click-baity images. I would find myself scrolling for inordinate amounts of time through essentially online tabloids--something I would never do in "real life". I make fun of those dumb magazines when I see them in the grocery store. But it's different when they're in your pocket and you see them every single day because the platform has forced you to open it every single day or risk letting your best friend down in this makeshift honor system it has devised.

So yeah. It's my own fault I can't not click on "20 Hottest Oscar Winners" articles and "This Photographer Photographs Strangers Naked Together to Make a Statement About Self Empowerment" videos. Those things are dumb and have no place being in my brain--but they're just tantalizing enough to make me click on them and invade my mind with trashy nonsense. (Sorry for saying trashy like 25 times in this post--it's just really the most apt adjective for Snapchat's whole vibe).

What Discover Looked Like by the Time I Deleted the App

Anyway, the bottom line was I was letting Snapchat fill my mind with garbage. I'm already good enough at thinking up garbage nonsense on my own without needing an app to help me. I finally decided enough was enough. It was consuming my brain and my time and I was so sick of feeling guilty for almost forgetting to send a picture of my chin to my BFF every day for fear of losing our oh so necessary streak. I was feeling trapped and enslaved and downright stir crazy. So I told G I was sorry but that when I left for Costa Rica, that was the official end of my time on Snapchat.

How Life Has Been Sans the Snap

How I Feel Without Snapchat in My Life, as Illustrated by this Dude on
Snapchat...

I deleted Snapchat right before I left for Costa Rica back in January. I've been living Snap free for almost six months now and I can honestly say with no hesitation that I don't miss it a single bit. I thought I would miss staying in constant contact with G, because that was our main source of communication, but since deleting the app, we've started texting instead, and that has honestly been way way more meaningful to me than Snapchat ever was, and there's none of the contrived pressure to stay in contact every single day even when we don't actually have anything important to say to each other.

I was also hesitant about deleting the app because I had lots of videos and pictures saved on the private section of the app, but I was easily able to download all that stuff to my phone to keep.

So I don't miss anything. But have I gained anything by not having the app in my life? 100% yes. Now if I wanted to read trashy tabloid articles, I would have to actively seek them out. Which as I mentioned, I would never actually do! Sure it's not like Snapchat was the root of all my problems. I still get really sucked in by compelling YouTube headlines and clickbaity Buzzfeed articles. But I still feel like by deleting Snapchat there's just one less opportunity to click on garbage at any given time. Especially because Snapchat had become seriously so compulsive and daily to me. It was literally the form of media I was consuming the most and it had just really gotten out of hand. So not having it in my life anymore has been such a relief.

I feel like those friendships that were being "maintained" over Snapchat have been forced to grow into way stronger connections where we, ya know, actually talk to each other. Which has been a really good thing. I also no longer am privvy to all the gross things my old high school classmates are up to. Sure I still follow them on other social medias, but nobody has the balls to post as much garbage on Facebook or Insta as they do on Snap. Let's just be honest about that.

Recommendations for Others 

If you have Snap:

Well, my first and most sincere recommendation would be to delete it. You do not need it in your life, and your world is not going to stop turning if you break your streaks. Trust me. I did it and we're all still standing aren't we?

My second recommendation, if you're just not willing to delete the app yet, is this: ask yourself what this media is adding to your life, and then ask yourself what it is taking away. Lastly, ask yourself who is really in control when you're logged into the app. Do you make the decisions about what you see, or are your decisions being influenced by the makers of the app? Maybe the answers to those questions won't change anything. But maybe they will. Or maybe they'll at least make you think more frankly about what the purpose of the app is, and what your participation with the app should be. 

If you do not have Snap: Do not get it. You don't need it. You may be feeling FOMO because it seems like all your friends have it and talk about it all the time. But if that's the case, listen to the way they talk about the app, and look at how they act when they are using it. Do they act like their normal selves, or do they seem to put on a bit of a performance or different persona? Do they talk about a lot of drama that happens on the app, or do they talk about all the helpful things they've seen on it? Use those observations to help you in deciding if you really want to participate in the world of Snapchat. Also it might be good to keep in mind that Snapchat is likely on its way out:

Why I Think Snapchat will Die Soon: 

Before I even deleted the app, I posited quite often that Snapchat was dying. Now, it's been six months and people still seem to be using it, so I guess it's still hanging on. But I still predict it's on its way out, and even if it doesn't die off completely in the next year or so, it will cease to be one of the most used social medias out there.

The reasons for Snapchat's inevitable decline are pretty simple. First and foremost, technology turns over so quickly that nothing really lasts long at all, or at least nothing lasts in its original, intended state for very long. Sure Facebook is still around, but the platform that was started for everyone has been co-opted by the Baby Boomers. Sure, Twitter is still around, but it's been co-opted by political rapscallions (my affectionate name for anyone who posts anything remotely political on twitter, which seems to be pretty much everybody who's still on the app at this point). Sure, MySpace is still around, but it's been co-opted by--no one. Literally nobody still uses it. Everyone moved on. You get my point.

So, soon trashy teens and sorority chicks will latch on to a new platform, or just grow up into slightly more sophisticated versions of themselves and migrate fully to Instagram, which is still going strong and having a huge moment at the top right now.

The second reason why Snapchat will die is because there's not enough interpersonal connection. Contrary to popular belief, most people actually use social media (or at least their original intent is) to connect with other people. Snapchat's platform is based heavily on real world interactions--the way that actual conversations only exist for a finite amount of time in space, and are not able to be saved. And that's a beautiful concept in it's own way, but let's be reminded that we can get that same psychological experience from, um, as I said, real world interactions. We don't want apps to emulate experiences we already have. We want them to provide a new way to communicate, and typically we prefer ways where we can archive our interactions with one another for posterity. That's the beauty of the internet, that it has the capability to stick around as long as you want it. So a platform where by nature nothing sticks around--well, it probably won't stick around long either.

The last, and likely most fastidious reason why Snapchat will kick the bucket is because celebrities are moving to other platforms with more capabilities--and their posses are following suit. When Kylie Jenner announced in a tweet in February 2018 that she didn't really use Snapchat anymore, her flippant twitter soundoff was estimated to have lost the Snap company 1.3 BILLION dollars. That's the problem that comes from a company relying so heavily on "influencer" partners. If Kylie Jenner has the power to plummet the stock values of an independent company at the hands of less than 240 characters, ya might want to reassess your business model and marketing strategies.

Once Snapchat became popular, Instagram quickly rallied the troops and created their own Story feature, completely identical to Snap's hallmark, except, um, way better? Classier, more and different features, and in tandem with the staying power of their original concept. But if Kylie Jenner dropped a dis tweet at Insta, they'd probably be coughing up blood too.

I don't endorse that kind of absurd celebrity worship, but I do recognize how powerful it is. And one look at the Discover page of Snapchat can corroborate that they've put too many eggs in their "We Have Cool Celebrities on Our Platform!!" basket.

So yeah, this post was wayyyyyyyyyyy too long, but there's my 1.3 billion cents on Snapchat and why it basically sucks all around and I stopped using it. Now if only I were an "influencer" and this blog post could shut the whole app down... 

-VaughnDL