feeds vs stories
Because of my new project about celebrities, I wanted to analyse the "stories" format of Snapchat from a celebrity's point of view and compare it to the usual "feeds" format of other social media platforms.
Advantages
- There is only a single advantage I can think of. Stories open up full screen and thereby lead to an immersive experience. A celebrity would enjoy being the sole attention.
Disadvantages
- Instead of releasing plenty of cheap content, celebrities prefer to create few, high-quality content. They need the quality because they want to project and maintain a certain image. They need the artificial scarcity because they want to stay fresh and avoid getting depleted.
- Celebrities do not want their content to disappear, because they put a lot of effort into it. Fans do not want it to disappear neither, because they want to be able to return to it.
- Fans can react to a story only by sending a private message, but the celebrity can not possibly respond to thousands of messages. Of course, thousands of public comments left on a post inside a feed structure is also unmanageable. But a few replies can nevertheless create a big effect due the simple reason that everybody can see them. In particular, they will cause the other commentators to think that they may one day receive a reply as well.
- Each story needs to be tapped to be opened. This is a nice feature for the general public since not everyone posts interesting things all the time. But fans are different. They do not want to miss any of their celebrity's content. Making them tap all the time leads to a bad user experience.
- Celebrities love to receive likes and compare themselves to the other celebrities in their league. Stories can not be liked and their view counts are kept private.
- Before they are tapped, all stories appear as tiny circles presented linearly next to each other inside a tiny rectangle. Generally speaking, the current state of social media is already "too flat" for many celebrities. This compactification flattens the hierarchy even more by making the celebrity look as if she is waiting in a bus line.
Don't get me wrong. Stories is a very successful invention. It solves several important problems for the general public by placing an emphasis on rawness and ephemerality.
The fact that stories disappear after a while radically decreases the number of things to be consumed and creates a feeling of finiteness which is further reinforced by the compactification I mentioned above.
Feeds, on the other hand, often overwhelm people with their never-ending scrolling. Algorithmic filtering partially mitigates this problem by destroying the chronological flow and emphasizing the highly engaging posts, but it creates new supply-side problems and does not decrease the absolute number of outstanding posts waiting to be consumed. The already stressful process of content creation becomes even more stressful due to the added worry about receiving a high algorithmic score. People become more conservative and start emulating others who are already successful at "gaming" the system. Moreover, if they feel that they are getting filtered out, then they will simply stop publishing.
Of course, if the average person had followed a manageable number of accounts and created a reasonable number of posts per day, then there would have been no problems in the first place.
The reason why the feed structure is failing for the general public today is because it was born directly out of an analogy with the traditional publishing world, the world of celebrities.
Social media was an enormous success because it democratised fame, just like capitalism democratised money and democracy democratised power.* But it still needs some time to settle on the correct form. In particular, the structures people need to rise to fame may not overlap exactly with what they need to enjoy their fame.
Stories is a good format for the general public (i.e. amateur broadcasters starting off with no audience) because it takes into consideration our tendency to overwhelm ourselves and each other in costless, restriction-free** environments. Feeds on the other hand is a perfect format for celebrities (i.e. professional broadcasters with already existing large audiences) since it was born directly out of their own world anyway.
* Each wave of democratisation had a traumatic effect on masses. Fame is now something you have to run after, just like the other democratised forms of status. Your innate talents no longer limit you, just like your blood line no longer does. Of course, this also implies that if you fail to rise to fame, there is no one to blame but yourself. Since status is a relative good, distribution of fame within the society keeps getting renormalized over time. In other words, with the arrival of social media, we have successfully created yet another category where 99% of the population is mathematically guaranteed to fail.
** Democratisation of fame happened long after democratisations of power and money, because it had to wait for the development of technologies that made costless, restriction-free broadcasting possible. Before the digitalisation of media people used to routinely pay to follow their favourite celebrities. They would have never done that to follow each other.
