Snapchat’s new update repels its user base

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Jensen Abhau, Social Media Editor

Snapchat is known for being one of the most popular ways of communicating. The app is at many times called the “king of social media” for its demographic of high school students.

But maybe not for long.

Snapchat has two main pages. On the left, you have your incoming messages, known as snaps. This is where you can communicate with people you have added. And on the right is a page called stories. Stories are basically mini-video diaries that your friends post to the public for 24 hours.

In simpler terms, the left page is for direct communication and the right page is for public engagement.

Towards the beginning of this month, Snapchat released a new update that merges those left and right pages into one section.

And it sounds like everyone hates it.

More than one million people have signed an online petition to remove the new Snapchat update.

Sounds awful, right? Apparently it may be awful for the teenagers, the majority of Snapchat’s demographic, but not for the rest. Stocks for Snapchat soared more than 20 percent just hours after the new update went public.

Because of the merged pages and “simpler interface,” Snapchat has attracted many new users such as Facebook moms and adults who still can’t accept the fact that they’re adults.

So it may seem that Snapchat’s new update is awful, and the learning curve is severely damaging to long-term consumer’s loyalty to the app, but if anything, Snap Inc. is winning from all of this.

And with Snapchat’s CEO, Evan Spiegel, saying the update is here to stay, migrating to Instagram Stories (an almost identical copy of the old Snapchat) doesn’t seem so bad after all.