Why Is a 23 Year Old Still Using Snapchat?
someone send this to a PM at meta please (read the entire article to understand why)
Earlier this year I was getting ready for the Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit and needed a quick outfit opinion from my girls. Not a group chat - too many people who don’t know each other, too much chaos. Just a quick story, just for them.
So, I opened Snapchat to post a private story. That’s when I saw it: 13.6 GB of memories. The free limit is 5 GB (anyone else have the same issue?) Snapchat wanted me to pay for storage just to keep using a feature I’d relied on for years. I didn’t wanna do that so I said to myself “Fine, I’ll just do this on Instagram then.”
Except when I opened my Close Friends list to post there instead, I realized I’d have to manually audit the whole thing - removing people I didn’t want seeing this, adding the right ones, knowing I’d have to undo it all after. All this just for one story.
That’s when it hit me. Instagram has had Close Friends since 2018. It’s 2026. And I’m still opening Snapchat because Instagram only gives me one list.
Instagram’s idea is simple. You can create one private list and when you post a story, you can choose to share it with just those people. Everyone recognises the iconic green ring now. For 2018 that was genuinely useful. But it’s 2026 and the way people use Instagram has changed completely.
We don’t have one type of friend anymore. We have work friends, college friends, hometown friends, our girls, our family, the people we’d call at 2am and the people we’d invite to a networking event.
So here’s what I’d actually build.
Multiple Close Friends lists. You name them what you’d like “my girls,” “work people,” “family,” whatever. Each one gets its own color ring. When you go to post a story you just pick which list, the same way you already pick between “Your Story” and “Close Friends.” That’s it. No auditing, no group chats, no opening Snapchat for the fifth time this week.
And the thing is Instagram already has everything it needs to build this. The audience segmentation, the list management, the colored rings. This isn’t starting from scratch. It’s just finishing what they started.
Now why should Instagram actually care?
Snapchat is actively pushing its users away by paywalling storage. That’s a real opening. The people most likely to leave Snapchat are the same people who already live on Instagram - Gen Z, heavy story users, people who share different things with different people. Instagram could absorb that whole use case with one feature update.
And beyond Snapchat, it just makes the app stickier. Right now people either overshare because auditing is too annoying, or they just don’t post. Both of those are bad for Instagram. Give people better controls and they’ll post more. More posting means more engagement means more time in the app. It’s not that complicated.
If you made it this far, you probably have a Close Friends list you’ve been meaning to audit for three months. We’ve all been there.
Tag a PM at Meta. This one’s for the girls.