One of the most popular messaging apps, Snapchat now gets a major update, with a new feature known as ‘discover’. As described, Discover is a feature that lets users read, watch and, indeed, discover, content from major editorial publishers such as CNN, Comedy Central, ESPN and Vice.
The users can tap to open a new edition, swipe left to browse through different stories, or swipe up to see more from a story, in the Snapchat’s new ‘Discover’ feature. However, the stories or news feed which will appear on the section will not at all be like social media, these will be the random news appearing from the major news sources, as mentioned above. Snapchat makes it further clear about this case:
Snapchat Discover is a new way to explore Stories from different editorial teams. It’s the result of collaboration with world-class leaders in media to build a storytelling format that puts the narrative first. This is not social media.
Social media companies tell us what to read based on what’s most recent or most popular. We see it differently. We count on editors and artists, not clicks and shares, to determine what’s important.
The items in Discover will only exist for 24 hours, the old ones will disappear immediately. Snapchat explains the cause for this as ‘what’s news today is history tomorrow’.
Snapchat thus, clearly denies that the ‘Discover’ feature is a new social media, but the users still will see it that way, since all they see on the social media nowadays are mostly the news and barely something else. If a popular messenger app like Snapchat adds the news feed feature in it, then the users (last Summer, the Wall Street Journal reported that Snapchat had more than 100 million monthly users) would not have to go somewhere else just to see the news.
