Every time Snapchat's UI/UX is brought up on Hacker News it's praised as "it facilitates the joy of feature discovery!" (example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10859860)
It's a post-hoc rationalization that I am still not happy with. (even moreso 2 years later with more apps like Facebook/Skype copying Snapchat verbatim)
Mix one part neglect and abuse with one part intense pleasure from finally getting what you were looking for. Enjoy your Stockholm Syndrome cocktail, rinse and repeat.
Old people wonder 'WTF is this Snapchat?', they download the app, dick around with it for a few minutes and dismiss it as incomprehensible. It's a feature, not a bug.
You can more or less click away like on a good old Kodak Instamatic while retaining full control of every aspect of your picture if you wish.
IMO, Snapchat should be the easiest to decentralize and federate b/c the ephemeral nature allows expectations to be set for simple hosting like Digital Ocean. Who cares if data gets deleted?
Instagram is not a "serious" photo app. It's strictly for fun. if you want to shoot serious pictures, you use a purpose built app, or heck, even the built-in app on your phone. Making the UI a hide-and-seek game, or at least abandoning traditional UI design for something that puts form over function makes sense in that context.
There's an actual game on Steam called "Please, don't touch anything" where this kind of random discovery is the whole point.
Not sure I'd prejudicially dismiss it as "millennial smugness" though.
The original was a web game way back in the day called "Don't shoot the puppy". When I realised what was going on I nearly died laughing. My flat mates thought I was having a seizure.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/354240/Please_Dont_Touch_A...
It is a funny sort of opposite of games the "The Room" where you are indeed supposed to touch everything.