By Daniel Salvio

I would bet close to every single one of you reading this right now have this app on your phone. It is the No. 2 free application on the iTunes app store.  It has been around since Sept. 2011, and personally is one of the most-used apps that I own: Snapchat.

The social media giant Snapchat has recently made a variety of questionable and very noticeable updates to the app that leave many members of the user base with a bad taste in their mouths.

The new update has integrated a new interface for viewing friends’ stories, sending messages, adding new users and has added a noticeable amount of advertisements to draw up additional revenue. However, the biggest outrage comes from a change in the order of friends’ stories.

In past versions of the app, stories were listed in chronological order with the first story being most recent, until the oldest story that was posted by a friend within the last 24 hours. Now they are posted on your feed based on who you talked to most recently or frequently, making it difficult and frankly annoying to view stories of people you keep in contact with less.

Not many people were fond of this. These changes received so much negative feedback that a petition was started on Change.org to have Snapchat revert the app back to its previous version. The petition is still open and currently sits at 367,420 out of 500,000 of its goal for signatures. So with such an overwhelming amount of disdain from users towards this “new and improved” Snapchat, many are asking, “Why did they do this?”

The simple answer is money.

The new design of the application has lead to a spike in new accounts being created for Snapchat, and makes it easier for said users to get involved and benefit from posting often. It also combines the celebrity stories and advertisements into one entire section of its own, which has shown a boost in ad revenue and views for the featured celebrities.

In light of this data, the redesign seems like a complete no-brainer for Snapchat, but they have not ignored the pleas for turning back time and going back to their previous format. Within the past few months they released an update for specific users who complained about the changes as a gesture of good faith, and to test both models at the same time.

However, I think that the solution might lie somewhere in the middle.

If they were to revert the stories back to chronological order while keeping the design and layout style of the current latest update, they can possibly get the best of both worlds for ad revenue and user happiness. The smooth new layout of the app and the combination of celebrity posts with new advertisements in the Discover section of Snapchat will still be appealing to both old users and newcomers, while the new (old) story layout will no doubt please the majority of users and, most importantly, keep the veteran users of the application happy and coming back again and again for new updates, no longer worried that each new one will throw a curveball at them and they will regret its existence in the first place.

As of now though, change does not seem to be coming quickly.

After Snapchat made slight changes in February to make the layout slightly easier to use, it has not addressed or made any promises to look into any other of the multiple complaints about the current setup. In fact, in February of 2018 the company released a statement saying they they were taking their time with responding to complaints in an expectation that users would “get used to” the new setup.

It is now two months later and as many of you can tell, we have not gotten used to it. Hopefully Snapchat will once again respond to user feedback and possibly make the changes I’ve suggested above, or something remotely close to it.

If they don’t, they may receive harsher backlash that they expect, and the app that many of us grew up with may not last much longer.

Daniel Salvio, FCRH ’19, is an economics major from Shelton, Connecticut.