As a home-schooled teenager in Agoura Hills, Calif., Jordyn Gilbert’s social life revolves around Snapchat. The app—known for the disappearing photos and videos called Snaps that its users share with others—is the default mode of communication for Gilbert and her friends. She estimates she has 70 Snapchat “streaks” at the moment—which means she sends Snaps to and receives Snaps from at least 70 other people a day.
Snap, the company that owns Snapchat, didn’t have to do much arm-twisting to get a power user like Gilbert, now 18, to sign up for a new $3.99-a-month subscription service called Snapchat+ in July 2022. Some of the service’s benefits were small—for example, Gilbert was able to change the circular camera icon to a heart.
But other features struck a deeper chord inside her. One feature, Friend Solar System, showed how close Gilbert was to her Snap friends in comparison with others, a ranking based on how often they chatted with each other. The feature illustrated those relationships using the metaphor of planets and their proximity to the sun. In one case, Gilbert was hurt to discover that she had dropped to Neptune, the most distant planet from the sun, in relation to a crush.
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