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Why Snapchat’s “Spotlight” sucks
(From an avid social media user’s perspective)
Spotlight, a feature added to Snapchat in February 2019, is a way to share entertaining snap videos with everyone. If you are familiar with TikTok (as I’m sure you are), then the concept is pretty much the same — short videos you can scroll through for hours.
So why do I think Snapchat’s Spotlight sucks?
1 — No comments feature
Audience engagement is really important on all social media sites, however there are no comments included in Spotlight. Rival app TikTok utilises comments well, with audience engagement with posts sometimes equally entertaining, or informative as the post itself — and there have been many occasions where a comment will have hundreds and thousands of likes. People like to share their opinions and emotions, and Snapchat’s Spotlight is limited by this.
2 — Scrolling through hashtags
Spotlight does make use of hashtags to categorise videos, however the layout of these hashtags is strange — if there are more than 4 hashtags, you have to scroll horizontally to read or interact with them. Considering the spotlight feature uses vertical scrolling to go through the videos, the horizontal hashtag scroll feels quite uncomfortable.
3 — No data on likes and shares
On Spotlight, you cannot see how many times a video has been liked or shared, which isn’t inherently bad, however the “Like” is still a strong social currency, used to measure popularity. Psychologically, the “Like” count is very important when it comes to social media — “viewing photos with many (compared with few) likes was associated with greater activity in neural regions implicated in reward processing, social cognition, imitation, and attention.” (The Power of the Like in Adolescence, 2016).
4 — Snapchat’s Sound library limiting trends
Many social media platforms make use of trending topics, or videos — Twitter, for example, has a section for trending hashtags that…
