Snapchat CEO reveals how he reacted to finding out Instagram was going to copy iconic 'Stories' feature
Snapchat's CEO has finally weighed in on how he felt after Instagram copied the iconic 'Stories' feature that became so synonymous with his social media platform, offering assessment on whether it was an 'injustice'.
'Stories' is undeniably one of Instagram's most recognizable and valuable features for its users, allowing them to reveal brief insights to their followers that disappear forever after 24 hours.
Having been part of the social media platform for nearly a decade now it's hard to imagine using Instagram without Stories, but it was actually a feature that was copied directly from rival app Snapchat.
Snapchat's entire ethos was short-lived content that would disappear, and they'd introduced Stories to the app over three years prior to Instagram's adoption of the feature, and it was one of their most used components.
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Now, nearly 9 years after his core feature was 'stolen' from him, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has finally revealed how he felt and still feels about Instagram's actions on The Diary of a CEO podcast.
When asked whether he ever considered getting in contact with Mark Zuckerberg after it was revealed that Instagram would be adopting Stories, Spiegel explained:
"No we didn't do that, I think one of things that I really admire about Kevin Systrom [Instagram's founder] is when they copied the Stories feature they stopped pretending that they were doing anything different.
"With things like 'Poke' they tried to pass it off as their own creation, 'oh we're doing it a little bit differently', with Stories Kevin Systrom came out and just said 'hey, we think this is a really great feature, this is a really great product and we're going to steal it and put it in Instagram and we think you're going to love it', and I think the honesty at least was admirable."
It's clear that there's no bad blood felt between the companies then, especially as both remain incredibly successful multi-billion dollar companies.
Spiegel even reveals that he copied features from other social media platforms in the past too, illustrating one idea he nabbed from TikTok creator ByteDance back when they just had news app Toutiao.
"In the very early days I went to visit ByteDance when they only had Toutiao [...] but it was backed by AI, by ML [machine learning]," Spiegel reveals.
"When I saw that, that was really inspiring to me and we made a big change to our product. We actually separated out all the creator and publisher content from 'Stories from Friends', and we said unlike social media where you're seeing content based on what your friends like or what your friends comment on, on Snapchat we're going to do ML-driven recommendations.
"So you'll have content from your friends but then you're going to have this whole other world of content from creators and publishers that's going to be recommended based on your interests and what you're passionate about, so I do think drawing inspiration from other companies and other businesses is part of innovating."
This decision and 'innovation' from Snapchat was one of the earliest moments when social media would introduce algorithm-based recommendations to its users, which is by far the dominant mode that we see used in almost every platform today, and much like how Instagram copied stories, Snapchat wouldn't have had the idea without copying ByteDance.