Why is Snapchat Demoting the Snapchat Planets Feature?
Snapchat launched a feature called “Snapchat Planets” for its Plus members, which quickly gained popularity. However, the Wall Street Journal reported that this feature might not be suitable for the new generation. After much discussion, Snapchat was eventually forced to make some changes to this feature.
What is the Snapchat Planets System?
The Snapchat Planets Solar System shows how close your friend is to you. When you use Snapchat Planets, you are the sun in the solar system, and the remaining eight planets represent your top 8 best friends.
If you and your friend send each other the most streaks, you both will be each other’s 1st closest friend, represented by Mercury.
Is Snapchat Planets Safe for Younger Users?
There has been a lot of controversy that Snapchat planets are having a bad impact on the minds of the younger generation. This is because some friends in real life are best friends, but in the Snapchat solar system, their best friend is someone else.
Seeing this, the WSJ stated that when a friend sees in the friend’s solar system that their best friend is someone else, they get upset. Therefore, this feature can become a cause of trouble in the lives of young people.
What snapchat has recently made changes?
After WSJ’s research, Snapchat stated that only 0.25% of daily users use the solar system feature, which is approximately 140,000 people and in the USA, 20 million users use Snapchat, but very few buy Snapchat+. So Snapchat decided to disable this feature by default. If a user subscribes to Snapchat+, they can manually enable this feature by going into the Snapchat settings.
Final Words
In this article, it is mentioned why the Snapchat Planets feature was disabled and the controversy behind it.
In my opinion, Snapchat did the right thing by making this feature optional because it depends entirely on me whether I want to use it or not. If I want to use it, I can enable it, otherwise, I can leave it disabled.
