Teenagers, and for that matter, everyone yearns for smaller private spaces where they can share whatever they want with their closest friends — without any reservations of judgement from their parents, grandmas or uncles. I used to love Instagram, until Facebook decided to make it Facebook v2 by making my entire "friend" list follow me there as well. That means that until I invest a lot of time hiding my story from everyone but my closest friends (and of course no one has time for that), I'll just refrain from posting some of my true self there.

On the other hand, the tight knit and private nature of the Snapchat network is going to keep it more attractive to me. At least for me, the amount of time spent in an app is more correlated with the depth of my relationships with other nodes on that network, and not just with the size of my audience.

I’ve loved Snap as a company for a long time, and I like their pitch of using innovation as a moat: they have consistently innovated every year since their founding (Ephemerality, Stories, AR filters, Memories, Spectacles (although this has largely been a failure)), have a core set of users who really really love them, and are now playing to their strengths by positioning themselves well as the private space for you and your closest friends.