Less than a week later Wall St. Journal reported about how a Snapchat feature called “solar system” is adding to teen anxiety, the company has he responded by customizing how the feature works. The ranking system for paid subscribers today shows you how close you are to your Snapchat friends by displaying your position in their solar system. For example, a Mercury-placed friend would be someone you communicate with a lot, while a Uranus-placed friend would be someone not so close.
Of course, online chat doesn’t necessarily correlate to real-life relationships, and such a feature can lead to hurt feelings when someone realizes they’re not as close to a friend as they thought.
Snap says it’s received feedback that it can feel good knowing you’re close to someone, but it can also feel bad knowing you’re not as close as you’d like to be.
“We’ve heard and understand that the Solar System can make this feeling worse, and we want to avoid that,” the company said in a newsroom post Friday.
However, instead of removing the feature, as it did with the dangerous and controversial speed filter, which was accused of “sloppy design”, Snap simply disables the Solar System feature by default. Snapchat+ subscribers will still be able to enable the option if they choose.
“We hope this strikes the right balance between providing a feature that many who use it want, while avoiding annoying those who don’t want to use it,” the company explains.
Turning it off by default might cause some friction, but if the feature is already in demand among teenagers, then they’ll just hunt around for the setting to turn it back on.
Snap claims that Solar System isn’t that popular, noting that less than 0.25% of the community uses the option. But since it’s only available to paid subscribers, the small percentage isn’t surprising. A more relevant statistic would be how many Snapchat+ users have used the solar system or seen the feature.
Although users can’t see who’s closest or farthest from their friend, finding out they’re not number one has led to some heated discussions, the WSJ reported, and even breakups.
Snap defends the feature saying people wanted to learn more about their friendships and features like the Solar System provide “additional awareness and context.” But really, it’s a way to keep young people — a demographic where social hierarchy is key — addicted to using Snapchat.
The Solar System feature was just one of Snapchat’s friend ranking systems. It also offers a private feature called “Best Friends” that puts the people you communicate with the most at the top of your contact list, along with a heart or smiley emoji, the WSJ noted.
Another much-discussed feature called “Streaks” is a tool that Snapchat users encourage repeat use of its app by offering a visual representation of how many consecutive days users have stayed in touch with each other on the app. After many reactions from parents and familieslegislators and regulators alike the addictive nature of the trait and psychological damage, Snap last year introduced a way to stop your streaks. Also added a way for users to restore a lost Streak.
While Snap promises in its blog post that it’s “committed to mitigating the potential downsides of online communication wherever possible,” it has purposefully built features and tools that have at least left it open to lawsuits and Congress researchif not worse.
