This was around the era where Snapchat was starting to take off, and I think someone real forward-thinking should have seen the writing on the wall that young people don't want to be doing all of their social interactions in public any more, nor do they want their cringey past coming back to haunt them. They were on Facebook, and then their moms all joined Facebook. They migrated to Instagram, and then Facebook bought it and pushed all the moms there too. Snapchat though, has a couple unique aspects that I think were critical to its success.
First, all the interactions are built around curating who sees it, and keeping things private and temporary. The most public thing you can do is post a story, and that's where you send stuff that even if your mom adds you, you can keep that in mind while sharing to that. But for anything else, you build up a list of people who can see your private story, and send it to that one. And everything that goes to either of those places is gone after 24 hours, which was also not exactly a selling point for the older generation that want to use social media as a scrapbook.
The other thing is that Snapchat is quite unintuitive and confusing to use. I've seen this stated as a criticism, and sure you can make it that, but I think that's also part of the secret sauce that made it so successful. The way you use the app is like its own separate language compared to all social media platforms of the past. And that in itself is enough to keep older people off of it, who had enough trouble trying to figure out Facebook. Plus I think there's some fun and engagement to be had when someone says "hey did you know you can do this?" and you discover a new feature in the app. I've been of the theory that Snapchat keeps itself awkward to use on purpose, because it seems legitimately beneficial to keeping its user base.
It did, but it still doesn't have the quickly-expiring content and fast interactions like Snapchat. Google+ was basically a Facebook clone but with more complicated sharing settings.
If anything, Google+ seemed to encourage people posting everything publicly. I didn't use it much, but I recall being able to click around into people's profiles and see a bunch of public posts, more than you'd expect clicking into a random profile on Facebook. I'm sure this was in part due to the fact that once they got people to merge their YouTube channel with their Google account, all your comments would show up as public G+ posts. Nothing about Google+ seemed like a private social experience to me.
First, all the interactions are built around curating who sees it, and keeping things private and temporary. The most public thing you can do is post a story, and that's where you send stuff that even if your mom adds you, you can keep that in mind while sharing to that. But for anything else, you build up a list of people who can see your private story, and send it to that one. And everything that goes to either of those places is gone after 24 hours, which was also not exactly a selling point for the older generation that want to use social media as a scrapbook.
The other thing is that Snapchat is quite unintuitive and confusing to use. I've seen this stated as a criticism, and sure you can make it that, but I think that's also part of the secret sauce that made it so successful. The way you use the app is like its own separate language compared to all social media platforms of the past. And that in itself is enough to keep older people off of it, who had enough trouble trying to figure out Facebook. Plus I think there's some fun and engagement to be had when someone says "hey did you know you can do this?" and you discover a new feature in the app. I've been of the theory that Snapchat keeps itself awkward to use on purpose, because it seems legitimately beneficial to keeping its user base.