Image Credit: Snap CEO Evan Spiegel; /techcrunch
Less than a week later The Wall Street Journal reported this information The company said that Snapchat’s Solar System feature has scared teenagers He replied Customizes how the feature works. Today’s paid subscriber rating system shows you how close you are to your friends on Snapchat by showing them your position in the solar system. For example, a Mercury-placed friend is someone you communicate with often, while a Uranus-placed friend is someone you’re not close to.
Of course, online chats are not necessarily associated with real-life relationships, and such a feature can lead to feelings of hurt if one realizes that they are not as close to a friend as they thought.
According to Snap, the feedback is that knowing you’re close to someone can feel good, but knowing you’re not as close as you’d like can feel bad.
“We have heard and understand that a solar installation can make this feeling worse and we want to avoid that,” the company announced in a newsroom post Friday.
However, instead of removing the feature, as was the case for “negligent design” in the case of the dangerous and controversial Speed Filter, Snap simply turned off the solar feature by default. Snapchat+ subscribers can enable the option if they want.
“We hope this strikes the right balance between providing a feature that many users want to use and avoiding inconvenience to those who don’t,” the company explained.
Disabling it by default can cause problems, but if the feature is really in demand among teenagers, they’ll just look for the settings to enable it again.
According to Snap, Solar System is not very popular, noting that less than 0.25% of the community uses this option. However, since it’s only available to paying customers, the low percentage isn’t surprising. The most relevant statistic is the number of Snapchat+ users who have used Solar System or viewed the feature.
Although users can’t tell who’s as close or distant as them, discovering they’re not number one has led to some difficult conversations and even breakups, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Snap defends the feature by saying that people want to know more about their friendships and that features like Solar System provide “additional awareness and context.” But in reality, it’s a way to keep young people — a demographic where social hierarchy plays a key role — engaged on Snapchat.
The Solar System feature is one of Snapchat’s friend rating systems. According to the Wall Street Journal, they also offer a special feature called “Best Friends” that puts people at the top of your contact list with heart-shaped or smiley face emojis.
Another hotly debated feature is called “streaks”. It’s a tool that encourages Snapchat users to revisit the app by visually representing how many consecutive days they’ve interacted with each other through the app. After feedback from Parents and familyAnd legislators and regulators alike The nature of the addictive function And because of the psychological damage, Snap introduced a way to stop your streaks last year. Also added a way for users to recover lost fonts.
Although Snap promised in its blog post that it is “committed to mitigating the potential disadvantages of online communication wherever possible,” the company has consciously created features and tools that it least exposes to users. complaint and Congress a questionIf not worse
