You might remember Snap’s 2017 earnings call when Spiegel admitted he had heard that “Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use,” particularly for older folks. Months later, Snap pushed out a major redesign to reclaim those users, jamming Stories between private messages, among other changes that ended up infuriating more users than it attracted.
A 2018 Change.org petition to “remove the new Snapchat update” received 1.2 million signatories, while celebrity influencers like Kylie Jenner, Chrissy Teigen and Marques Brownlee expressed their frustration. But even worse, the redesign cratered the platform’s ad views and revenue, alienating its younger userbase while failing in its bid to attract older users. By May of 2018, Snap was scrambling to roll back some of the changes.