"This might sound corny. But as more of our digital spaces become stuffed with news — and, perhaps more alarmingly, suffused with an anxiety to always put forward your best self — there seems to be a growing appetite for honest, unself-conscious personal sharing online. That is helping to fuel not only Instagram Stories but also Snapchat, which recently surpassed the unceasingly newsy Twitter in daily use, and Musical.ly, a two-year-old app on which young people (mostly) make music videos.
These are among a handful of apps that are creating a charming alternative universe online — a welcome form of earnest, escapist entertainment that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, in a way that recalls an earlier epoch in carefree internet socializing.
“The irony is that if you’d asked people in 2008 about Facebook, they would have said the same thing — that Facebook was the first thing that felt raw, personal and emotional rather than, ‘Here’s a link to another story about Donald Trump,’” said Josh Elman, a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners. He has worked at Twitter and Facebook and is an investor in social apps includingMusical.ly...
The differences are instructive. On Facebook, my friends will post about their promotions; on Snapchat, they tell you about their anxieties at work. On Facebook, they show off smiling photos of their perfect kids on some perfect vacation. On Snapchat, they show pictures of their kids in the midst of some disastrous tantrum, throwing food all over the floor, peeing in the tub, covered in mud and paint and food, because hey, that’s life, O.K.?"
There is something magical about Snapchat.
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