With nearly 95% of young New Zealanders using Snapchat, staff writer Lyric Waiwiri-Smith looks back at the rise and fall and rise of the yellow app.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that each new generation to possess a smartphone will believe the technology habits of their elders are too cringe to be carried on. The text-heavy, all-eyes-on-me Facebooking of the 2000s was replaced by Instagram photos in the 2010s, before Snapchat swooped them off their perches with the combination of video and photo sharing away from the public view. Then on February 22, 2018, a major incident of catastrophic proportions shook the tech world. 

“Sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me,” a saddened Kylie Jenner wrote on Twitter. “Ugh this is so sad.” In 18 words, the young Jenner summed up a deep hopelessness and depression felt across the globe at the time. Snapchat had redesigned its app a month earlier, combining the Friends and Story pages with no chronological order. Chaos ensued.

The update led to a Change.org petition calling for the update to be removed (1.2m signatories) while Jenner’s tweet saw the company lose US$1.3b in stock, before Snapchat later reported its first decline in daily users and eventually bowed down to the mob demands with a revised update. But the damage was done: Snapchat was never to be seen on my smartphone ever again.

When a platform’s biggest promoter loses faith (and Jenner was to Snapchat what Elon Musk is to X/Twitter, without the official job title) and control of the features that set it apart, the consumers tend to go as well. Since then, new social media platforms have risen (TikTok) and fallen (Threads) and risen (Telegram) and fallen (BeReal), all trying to offer something new while keeping up with the innovations and copy-cat tactics of their competitors. So, would you be surprised that in the year 2024 AD, Snapchat alone reaches nearly 95% of New Zealanders in the 13-24 age bracket, according to its own data?

It’s a significant number of young people dedicating their eyes to a single social media platform many believed to have faded into the abyss, . When you consider how much stronger Snapchat’s command is compared to its competitors, it might blow your mind. 70% of New Zealanders aged 18-24 use TikTok, while only 61% of New Zealanders in the 15-25 age bracket use Instagram, compared to 49% using Facebook.

A colleague’s young daughter recently put in a powerpoint pitch to get her first-ever Snapchat account. “ALL my friends have it,” her powerpoint read. “I’m getting fonhsc (fear of not having Snapchat).” There were promises to not use the app’s AI functions (the app includes a feature which allows parents to block Snapchat’s My AI) and no friending strangers, as well as a plea to no longer miss out on the banter going down in the school group chat. At the end, a throwaway add-in: “this also goes for TikTok if I can get an account as well.” The pitch worked (for Snapchat, at least).

When the school rumour mill transfers from the playground to a social media platform, the rangatahi will naturally want to follow. Fifteen year old Robyn summed Snapchat’s attraction up as such: “all my friends were using it.” It’s a place for kids to keep up with who’s coming to school and who’s not, a flower bed for the “talking stage” of dating, and sometimes a medium to spread drama and start fights, but Robyn is aware that what goes down on social media isn’t necessarily a reflection of reality.

If you’re chatting with a guy, he might say “some, like, romantic things, and then just completely ignore you in person,” she says, “they don’t have the confidence to, like, say anything in real life.” In other words, Snapchat has replaced texting as the medium of choice for self-conscious flirting. 

Snapchat’s parental controls do give guardians more power over their child’s safety on the app, and digital natives are already aware of their options to keep themselves safe. “Obviously there’s gonna be weird experiences because guys are just weird in general … but like, you just block and report them .” In all, Robyn says she “probably [uses Snapchat] too much to not say I’m a fan.”

As someone who sits at the geriatric end of this age spectrum (I am 24), I had for a while blindly assumed Snapchat was still deep in its grave, post-Jenner exodus. This was until after the pandemic, when a return to live events painted a different picture, one with dog-ears and a permanent crying face: at almost every concert I went to, the teenagers around me were checking Snapchat.

Hanging out with teenagers is not something someone in their mid-20s often does or should do at all, so observing them at concerts is as close to catching them in their natural habitat as I can get. They’re taking photos, checking stories, trying filters and firing off disappearing messages, and doing everything my friends and I did with the app eight years ago until Kylie Jenner told us it wasn’t cool any more. But then I realised my friends still use Snapchat too.

My flatmate uses it to communicate with friends overseas. Other mates are aware of certain business dealings available through the app, and some still enjoy those filters. Snapchat is definitely not the app we’re most vocal about – if something major within the friend group happens, we usually see it on Instagram (often through Stories, one of the app’s most popular features, copy-catted from Snapchat) or hear about it through Messenger – but it’s still there, piling onto the rest of our notifications and drawing in our eyeballs.

A rebrand to realness

During the Super Bowl in February this year, Snapchat launched a new advertising campaign describing the app as anti-social media. Tapping into the point of difference that made BeReal a momentary hit, the ad focused on promoting connection and authenticity, while taking aim at its competitors: “more likes, less love … more contrived, less believable … more consuming, less alive.”

In Snapchat’s eyes, the app’s pure purpose is to serve as a messaging system. “Snapchat is different to other platforms and was designed from the beginning as an antidote to social media, to help people communicate authentically and in the moment with their real friends,” a Snapchat statement said. “Messaging with close friends and family has always been the primary reason people use Snapchat.”

As is demonstrated by the existence of the Finsta, young people do yearn for online connections that feel real, and a safe space to express themselves. But the focus of Instagram for many is to grow an account, discover content creators and promote yourself – it has various functions, but that can get overwhelming when all you want to do is send a message.

Now that the younger generations are wanting to retreat back into privacy while still having access to social media, Snapchat has returned as a social media giant. The app’s multiple safety features for teens and its disappearing messages feature – modelled on real life, when you bump into someone, have a conversation off the cuff, then go about your day – allows rangatahi to be embarrassing on the internet without the fear of having something come back to bite you. In the days before we really understood the impact of our digital footprint, unedited comments and dodgy photos would come back to haunt us and resulted in much scrolling back and deleting. Now, life can be a post-and-forget.

So, where does everyone else go?

With nearly three million users in Aotearoa, Facebook remains the most popular social media platform for millennials, gen x and baby boomers (though those aged 40-59 are also giving a boost to Instagram). A 2023 report from social media agency Culture found that, across all age groups, the main reason for using social media is to keep in touch. And yet, TikTok – the endless stream of short videos – is seeing the biggest growth across all age groups.

Behind TVNZ, Stuff and the Herald, social media is the most popular online form of entertainment and news-sharing, though audiences report low trust in the news they consume there. Social media keeps us informed with the wider world around us as well as our immediate friends and family, so its weaving into the fabric of our real lives means there’s sometimes no distinction between the life happening in front of us, and the life happening on our screens.

With the exception of TikTok, most of the major social media players are the ones which popped up around the mid-2000s-early-2010s, like Facebook and Instagram. With these platforms copying each other to the point of morphing together, diversity in the market is wanted by audiences, but new social media apps often fail to cement themselves in the social fabric. 

Instead, Snapchat is using a new method, which is actually incredibly old: just encouraging people to talk to each other. There’s the gimmicks, like the filters and a Spotlight page to see trending videos, but the app knows that its power is in its most basic function, and that this is what its core audience wants. In an email sent to staff in early September, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel compared his business’s model to eatery In-N-Out, writing the fast-food company “developed a loyal following by using high quality ingredients, focusing on doing a few things exceptionally well, and obsessing over customer satisfaction to deliver an excellent customer experience.”

Writing this hasn’t been enough to convince me to download Snapchat again – I cannot trust myself to ignore the ‘memories’ tab and not cringe at every conversation I’ve saved – but being aware of the social media habits of the youth can teach us a lot about what is important to them, how these habits differ by age group and who remains king in the media sphere. Sometimes, it is possible for an app to momentarily fall off and come back bigger than ever. Next, we’ll be finding out that Threads is back.