The public snaps are absolutely not a good way to keep up with the world around you. When I still used it, it was just celebrity slop on the public snaps. If that has changed then idk.

Aside from all the very valid criticisms everyone else has pointed out, there’s one thing that always made it totally unusable for me… When you open the app, the very first thing it does is show your front-facing camera?? What kind of unhinged behavior is that, are they trying to ruin my day?!

Do not confuse any of the content you see on Snapchat as news. It is an advertisement. It is a free service and the content is highly competitive, so it must be enticing to pull you in and it has one objective: to generate revenue.

If you want news, you need to find a new platform with different incentives. Lemmy removes the profit incentive, a news website keeps the profit incentive but add transparency.

If you want to keep up with friends and they’re on Snapchat, then by all means use Snapchat, but the idea that you can use it as a platform to keep up with news is delusional.

I never understood the appeal. I watched it explode in popularity among the people around me, my family and friends. And the whole time I was like, “so it’s a messaging app that automatically deletes your conversations?”

But TBF I’ve never understood the appeal of any social media.

I’m 15 years old and live in Europe. Almost all of my friends (and the stranger next to me on the train) use Snapchat. Personally I find it very annoying as my experience mainly consist of getting spammed with meaningless, completely irrelevant and utterly boring selfies by anyone I happen to add. And then, just to make things worse people find it inpolite not to answer with another selfie. And then it’s the chats that kinda work but the UI looks clutterd and half baked. Also messages disappear after a while which is utterly annoying.

At least it would be kinda easy to find people on Snapchat (there’s no reason to ask around for someone’s number) if it wasn’t for the fact that people use the most random pseudonyms imaginable so it’s a pain just to know who is who, and almost impossible to pin down new people.

Also I don’t give it location sharing permission, that shit is creepy as fuck, I don’t want everyone that I kind of vaguely know to know where I am all the time

Jsyk you can disable the location stuff, but they do scan everything for “WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDRENNN” purposes which means it could just as easily be scanned for [ARBITRARY_NATIONAL_SECURITY_REASON] or whatever else they want so not sure it’s a very privacy friendly solution.

Their support also sucks ass - they bombed me with like 100+ emails the one day because their system must’ve glitched out. Never have gotten a real person before, it’s almost always a bot with a human name and the cam girl bot farms come through every now and then spamming you with friend adds

I have snapchat and I only use the chat feature hence why I haven’t given it location, microphone, or even camera permission. That’s right, Snapchat with no snaps, so all that’s left is chats. At that point, it’s basically Whatsapp for zoomers meets tiktok or something along those lines (depending on which features you use).

It’s funny how Snapchat was huge in Europe like a decade ago, this was before it even introduced chat feature or stories, it was only disappearing photos, then it died, then 3 or 5 years ago Americans picked it up as the foremost alternative to SMS/iMessage, and at the moment the European Gen-Z is getting into Snapchat again, or so I believe judging by the sample of 2 (two) cousins I have