This was around the era where Snapchat was starting to take off, and I think someone real forward-thinking should have seen the writing on the wall that young people don't want to be doing all of their social interactions in public any more, nor do they want their cringey past coming back to haunt them. They were on Facebook, and then their moms all joined Facebook. They migrated to Instagram, and then Facebook bought it and pushed all the moms there too. Snapchat though, has a couple unique aspects that I think were critical to its success.

First, all the interactions are built around curating who sees it, and keeping things private and temporary. The most public thing you can do is post a story, and that's where you send stuff that even if your mom adds you, you can keep that in mind while sharing to that. But for anything else, you build up a list of people who can see your private story, and send it to that one. And everything that goes to either of those places is gone after 24 hours, which was also not exactly a selling point for the older generation that want to use social media as a scrapbook.

The other thing is that Snapchat is quite unintuitive and confusing to use. I've seen this stated as a criticism, and sure you can make it that, but I think that's also part of the secret sauce that made it so successful. The way you use the app is like its own separate language compared to all social media platforms of the past. And that in itself is enough to keep older people off of it, who had enough trouble trying to figure out Facebook. Plus I think there's some fun and engagement to be had when someone says "hey did you know you can do this?" and you discover a new feature in the app. I've been of the theory that Snapchat keeps itself awkward to use on purpose, because it seems legitimately beneficial to keeping its user base.