Getty Images/Clemens Bilan
When Snapchat launched a few years ago, the press – including this publication – immediately hailed it as a sexting app.
Of course, it’s not entirely clear whether people were using it primarily as such. And Snapchat has since rehabilitated its image – it’s now perceived more as a messaging service aimed at millennials than anything else.
I’ve been writing about Snapchat at Business Insider for about a year. I use it as a primary or secondary means of communication with a number of my friends, and I’m pretty optimistic about the service (though I’m a little skeptical about whether you can make money from it).
I noticed a spike in the number of people following me on Snapchat last year, around the time I started writing about the service—from a few friends adding me every week, the number increased to 50 to 100 people adding me daily. I could only conclude that they had seen my username in my BI stories and added me.
I didn’t do anything with these random people – I had my settings set to private, so the only people who could see my stories or send me snaps were people I’d added back. In other words, these people were basically in a queue, waiting for me to allow them to send me snaps and view my Snapchat stories.
About 6 weeks ago, I finally decided to conduct a little experiment. I wondered how many people would view my rather mundane Snapchat stories if I let them.
So I changed my privacy settings. Before, only a dozen or two people would view my stories…
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…More than a thousand people watch my stories. (Still, that’s nothing compared to the nearly 2 million people who watch DJ Khaled’s snaps.)
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Then I decided to open up my snaps so anyone could take snaps of me. Almost immediately, I received a flood of dozens of unread snaps from random people. I felt a little uneasy. Would I regret this? Would I receive a selection of unsolicited NSFW images? Only time would tell.
Six weeks later, here are my findings:
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I’m pleasantly surprised that out of the thousands of people who sent me snaps, I haven’t received a single explicit image. Instead, most of the Snaps I receive seem to be from teenagers who have added me to a huge list of people they send silly selfies and videos to.
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I got a few snaps from people asking who I am (In my opinion, the better question is who She? I didn’t add any of them first) and people who identified me as a journalist (so I guess they remembered why they added me).
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I blocked some followers because they were sending spam messages and being annoying. but it’s still a very different story than what happened to me when I opened my Twitter direct messages last year.
And here’s a selection of the snaps I received, ranging from hilarious to bizarre.
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Here’s what I learned about Snapchat users after receiving thousands of snaps from hundreds of users (note that I didn’t respond to a single snap – these were sent to me unsolicited):
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Teenagers definitely use Snapchat, but they are not the only ones. I’ve gotten a lot of snaps from older users – people in their 20s, 30s and 40s based on their appearance – so Snapchat seems to be expanding slightly beyond the millennial user base.
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There are lots of selfies. About 80% of the Snaps I got were selfies with text overlaid. Others had a black background with drawings or writing on it, Snaps of people’s meals or surroundings, and lots of text messages saying “Hi” or “Hello.”
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No explicit images. I estimate I’ve received nearly 2,200 Snaps from people I don’t know in the last six weeks, and not one of them has sent me an explicit, non-work-appropriate image, much to my relief. Do I think that still happens on the platform? Absolutely. But it says something that I, a 23-year-old woman, can put my username out there for everyone to see without receiving an unwanted explicit image in response.
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People freak out early in the morning and late at night. I woke up with a round of “On the way to school” or “Good morning” snaps, and in the evening I saw a lot of them pop up again between 6 and 9 p.m.
When I opened my Twitter DMs in 2015, I received a ton of nasty garbage in my DMs. This included random “hi”s from dozens of people who didn’t follow me or even speak the same language as me; inappropriate messages from men that were too inappropriate to repost here; and so many PR requests. I promptly closed my DMs after a month. There was no good in being able to send me private messages publicly.
Harassment is a constant problem on Twitter. You never hear of similar incidents on Snapchat. Here’s my theory as to why that is.
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It’s much harder to stay anonymous on Snapchat. Snapchat requires your phone number to be linked, which increases accountability. It’s much easier to create a throwaway or fake account on Twitter, which only requires email verification.
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It’s much harder to find and discover users on Snapchat. In my opinion, that’s both an advantage of Snapchat in terms of privacy and a disadvantage in terms of user interaction. On Snapchat, you find your friends by knowing their username, scanning their personalized QR codes, or finding them by phone number. On Twitter, all you have to do is search for a person’s name – even if you’re not logged in. That’s all well and good in terms of privacy, but if you want to find the most popular Snapchat users or find new people to follow, you’re out of luck.
At the same time, I’m not stupid. I realize that abuse can happen on any platform, including Snapchat. If I ever need to report an account for harassment, I’ll make sure to take note of what kind of response I get from the company.
But for now, I don’t regret opening up my Snapchat account to everyone. I’ve learned a lot about user behavior by observing what kinds of snaps one user sends to another, seemingly random user. It’s confirmed my belief that Snapchat is becoming increasingly popular with all kinds of people around the world.
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The post “Here’s proof Snapchat isn’t a ‘sexting’ app” first appeared on Business Insider.
