Emoji for friendship. Why teenagers love Snapchat so much

Snapchat is a messenger launched back in 2011 (WhatsApp was launched in 2009 and Telegram in 2013), but in Russia it is still perceived as something new. Perhaps because every year it is discovered by the next generation of children and teenagers, and with them their parents.

This app is a full-fledged market player, though not ours. The messenger has a total monthly audience of 360 million people, and is used daily by 218 million. 90% of the app's audience are young people between the ages of 13 and 24. 41% of American teenagers prefer Snapchat to other social platforms and messengers.

Snapchat is almost certain to increase its share of users in Russia for the foreseeable future, but that is not the only reason to look closely at it. Indirectly, the app and its creators are already influencing us: secret disappearing correspondence, storis, and augmented reality masks have come to popular apps in our country from a quick Snapchat.

Another messenger

In this series, I talk about how modern social media, popular with kids and teens, is structured. So what is it about this messenger and why talk about it following TikTok and Likee?

Snapchat focuses on emoji, gifs, games, stickers, masks and lenses. If other messengers or networks have all of these, they are not at all in the foreground. Here, these additional effects are used as the main ones. Snapchat is essentially a hybrid of messenger and social network. If you thought Facebook was such a hybrid, it's not, it's all grown-up: messaging separately, statuses separately. Snapchat is much more advanced.

The word is a sparrow

The main thing about Snapchat is the ability to set the lifespan of a message. A photo, video, or text will disappear after 10, 9, 8, 7... seconds, or stay, if the owner allows it.

God knows how the creators of Snapchat came up with the solution that young users around the world like so much - unfortunately, all the texts about the app's early days are about the founders' lawsuits.

How they captured that frustration of an indestructible digital footprint that's like that plastic bottle - used once, but will exist for decades, maybe hundreds of years. Somewhere in the virtual clouds there are islands of information about each of us, and not all of them are pretty, some are rubbish. Just imagine: every member of this generation has a picture in a nappy in the cloud, and there's nothing they can do about it. Should they have appreciated being able to manage the shelf life of digital testimonials? Of course they did.

Disappearing messages allowed users to fool around again and not think about the digital footprint that everyone now has. By the way, the Snapchat founders' lawsuits used screenshots of standard messenger correspondence. Oh, how they regretted it, I suppose. There wouldn't have been those messages - and there wouldn't have been a problem.

However, the Snapchat format turned out to be fraught with all sorts of experiments, which the parents were very scared of. First of all, sexting is when users send intimate photos and erotic messages. On Snapchat, they have become more willing to do so, knowing that those will disappear. Yes, the recipient can take a screenshot and a notification about it will come in the correspondence. But only if the screenshot was taken using the phone's built-in function. Third-party apps allow such messages to be captured "incognito". In addition, "snaps" can also be captured on another device. Explaining to teenagers that there is still no guarantee of complete disappearance on the Internet is not easy. There have been numerous cases of sexual images scattered around classmate chat rooms the next morning.

Real friendships

Snapchat is focused on innovation. Not only have its creators come up with disappearing messages, storis, experimenting with augmented reality, microgames and other technologies. You can already connect Spectacles, the most stylish augmented reality glasses that allow you to shoot a video and send it immediately to Snapchat stories. But the focus of the app is on "friendship". That's why there are so many children and teenagers here. Here are some of the features that are literally "tying" kids to it.

Points and badges. No one gives you points for messaging your friends on Telegram, right? Snapchat does. If you keep up a correspondence for three consecutive days or more without interruption (Snapstreak), you get a special friendship "akit" and extra points to your Snapchat status. This digital friendship affirmation can mean a lot to children.

Bitmoji. You can make personalised full-length emoji with your face, hair, body type. They're not as pretty as the animated volumetric emoji in the latest iOS, but the app makes movies out of them - cartoon stories in which the bitmoji you make is the main character. The bitmods are so simple that each chat generates a pack of stickers showing you and the person you're chatting with in different situations: hugs, declarations of love, comical situations. These are, for example, the stickers with me and my friend.

Cameo. These are short gifs that feature your face. There are two-face gifs where you and your "pen pal" are dancing or riding a motorbike.
Mini-games. You could draw a picture and have your friend guess what it is. This kind of message engages the recipient in the game. There are games where you can compete in shooting AR objects and share the result in correspondence too.

Map

Snap Map displays your location on a real-time map. It can be seen by those you've added as friends, and you can see their location if they let you. You can switch this function off or use it in Ghost mode, which allows you to see the map but not show yourself on it. And I would advise all parents to explain to their children why visibility needs to be turned off. A Snapchat user's friends may be strangers. There's no race to get followers there like on Likee, but talking to your child about who they are adding as a friend and what that means is definitely necessary. If you're sure that only 'your own' are friends, this feature can be interesting, especially when a group of friends is attending the same event.

Snap Map also features news and events from around the world. By clicking on a spot, you can view geolocated snaps.

In addition to geolocation, the app also has geofilters - items that can only be unlocked by visiting a certain location. Then your content becomes visible not only to your friends, but also to all users who have also visited that location. Brands are increasingly creating their own geofilters so that users promote them in this way. A child can also create a special geofilter for his or her birthday, for example, so that friends can add it to their photos.

In fact, Snapchat's popularity is dwindling. Last year, the company defaulted on its commitments to investors. But this year, the creators are promising a major redesign of the app that will help keep "real friendships" even better. So this messenger may yet make an appearance in your children's lives.