Snapchat petition attracts one million signatures

My main dislike is that it now uses an algorithm to populate my "friends" section, hiding arbitrary friends from me. I have no confidence that I can see all my friends' stories because of the exceptionally poor UX.

On top of this, Snapchat has decided that people I connect with who don't connect with me are as valueless as random adverts and "influencers". I now have no way of consuming stories from people I find interesting without scrolling endlessly through ads and clickbait. Obviously this is by design but it is some of the most user-hostile UX I have encountered.

I like separating the influencer stuff from my contacts, but I dislike how they combined snaps and stories. My main issues: 1) not being able to see which friends have stories without clicking on each of them individually; I know you get notifications about new stories, but if you want to re-watch a story later it's a huge pain. 2) sorting friends "algorithmically" instead of chronologically; the sort isn't stable which makes it harder to track mentally. If they must have a fancy algorithm somewhere, I'd much prefer if they used it for the recommended "send to" list for a standalone snap (the reverse of the behavior present in the new update).

Yeah, and Chrissie Teigen‘s followers were never her friends, no matter what marketing BS she wishes to spin. I don’t much like snapchat (before or after), especially when people send textual messages (conversations are frustrating because I keep forgetting what’s being replied to), but have it because a few friends send me cool stuff on it and nowhere else... but this separation is a good thing. Blending commercial garbage with my friends stuff was always dumb.

As someone who uses both private snaps and stories equally, I think the update is a mess. It’s like having an inbox that includes a bunch of newsfeed that should be in its own public space.

Although not ideal, the previous version does it better by putting public stories together with publishers. Now that they have a totally separate page for popular stories and publishers (also adding the fact that it’s immensely annoying to scroll down huge images and headlines to find decent content), I’m discouraged to even swipe to that screen.

There was no real alternative for facebook. There is one for snapchat and it's called instagram stories. The way I see it, snapchat will lose even more users to instagram while at the same time increasing their per-user revenue. What's left to be seen is whether the increase in per-user revenue will make it up for the lost users.

In principle I like that I no longer have to look at all that clickbait shite when I go to look at Stories, that said the UX of the new friends screen is pretty wild. The app is also now almost unusably slow on my Nexus 5X - not THAT old a phone - which probably contributes to peoples' reactions.

I feel like this change is probably bad for Snapchat's revenue (in terms of clickthrough to sponsored articles etc) and good for the user, which is a refreshing trend, so I hope that if there is any reaction to this it is to improve UX on the friends screen and performance overall, and not to roll back.

I think it very much depends on whether the redesign is just a UX/UI "refresher" or if it actually completely changes the way the service works and how you use it.

I am thinking of Digg here which is a good example of a redesign that led to a significant outflow of users.

> A redesign has never encouraged any significant % of users to leave any service.

Digg

Digs redesign killed them, and caused Reddit to get all their users.

Look up Stumbleupon on google trends. Tons of users left immediately after their redesign.

The redesign can still hurt snapchat even if no users leave. Personally, before the update, I would look at the snapchat discover stories every day. Now I find the page so appalling to scroll through I don't navigate to it anymore. I think this is a large part of their business model, otherwise other companies won't purchase slots in the discovery page. It just depends if my experience is a one-off or if it holds for a decent percentage of snapchat users.

I can also say that I've basically stopped using Last.FM after one of their re-designs.

It's not that I have signed any petitions, it's that with new feature set and presentation, there wasn't any place in my life for this. I still scrobble but I'm not really visiting.

That, and failure to bring in positive change. Instead of addressing problems that I am seeing (e.g. trolls and bitter people spamming broadcasts of artists) they're tweaking colors. Ok, bye.

Digg.com

Yeah, I think two very different things are mixed together:

- "Different" always takes getting used to. One's central neural network literally has to rewire new connections (and/or change the impact of existing ones) - for things that one uses often enough to have a dedicated circuit (which does not mean those neurons that are involved doing _only_ one thing, those exist [0], but more often it's a network thing). Heavy daily users of a service probably do have circuitry responding to that service in particular, and it has to reorganize itself a bit after the service changes. However, "different" does not have any bias towards a direction, "better" or "worse". It is just resistance to change because change is costly.

- Whether the change actually _is_ for the worse (difficulty: define objective criteria).

The initial gut reaction alone cannot be used to differentiate between the two scenarios. The additional difference is that the first point always happens and can be traced to real effects, but the second one can be subjective, you first have to define what the overall purpose of something is in the first place, which in the case of some non-(life-)essential website is relative (to whom you ask) and also not static.

Even if a change is for the better by some objective criteria, the effect of the resistance to the change itself will always be there. So initial reactions that are non-specific and only are about "the change is bad" are not all that useful. The magnitude of the reaction also may be a symptom of either the popularity (if people spend more time with something any change will impact them harder), that something really is worse, or a mix of both, hard to tell on its own.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/one-face-one-neur...

Evan Spiegel is convinced that he's the second coming of Steve Jobs. http://www.businessinsider.com/what-its-like-to-work-at-snap...