Friendship is no longer just an interpersonal relationship that has its own rules and understandings. The Snapchat app has recently introduced a feature that classifies one user’s friends and takes out the best ones of them for preferential treatments. As a result, all the three best friends of an user can see how many messages does he send to the other two and when. This update has brought a lot of problems to teens all over the world, because it caused misunderstandings between them and their friends, who began to be more controlling and demanding. Uncertainty, distrust, and lack of confidence – all pointed out by Snapchat. However, Snapchat Best Friends feature has been eliminated temporarily, along with the latest update of the app, because more and more people were giving up Snapchat because of it.
Evan Spiegel, the Snap CEO affirmed that the reason behind the elimination is the privacy settings that a lot of users have asked for lately. Moreover, the feature will be retuning soon, but it will be quite changed in order to satisfy everyone’s needs and desires, and also assure the security of profiles.
“We’ll bring back BFs soon. A few higher-profile friends wanted to keep their usernames private-we’ll come up with a better way to do that.”
Snapchat has gained itself an image of a refreshing social media, that you can access from time to time and not having to create a serious profile that has to be maintained and kept updated regularly. A good and well-deserved relaxation, after all the tension that start to accumulate in the social networks everywhere. Self-destruction of selfies was like an open window with fresh air in a hot summer afternoon, because change is constant and updating your image every now and then is useful and permits people to take it from scratch easier. A rather superficial approach was expected from the other people on the line while chatting, because fewer strings were attached. But the impact over the users was grandiose, taking into consideration that they started concentrating more on enjoying the moment, rather than immortalizing it and keeping it into an album or archive. But everything became a problem when the update of Snapchat happened in the best friends area. Impersonal became very personal, and relationships were to be sacrificed. The good part of the issue is also that stalkers that used to follow what their friends were doing are also history, just like the Best Friends feature.
Image Source: Etanza Pinsky
