Best friends! (maybe not)

      So in January of 2015, Snapchat did away with their best friends feature due to the privacy concern. I'll admit I was a little bummed about that at first because for some reason I liked being able to know who my friends' best friends were. However, I got used to it pretty quickly and I even found that I really liked not having others see my best friends. A pressure to always have at least three best friends alleviated. Before, if you hadn't been using Snapchat frequently enough, everyone could see that with the phrase "No best friends :(" It was sad and manipulative. It made me want to use Snapchat just so I wouldn't ever get to that point.
     Well, not having best friends was nice while it lasted. With Snapchat's newest update came an emoji system of best friends. There are different emojis which stand for different relationships between two snapchatters.

Welcome back social media pressures. Social medias had this amazing feature before where you could be friends with people without anyone really having to know. There were ways to hide it. Snapchat has taken that out of the picture. Without realizing it or not, (they probably know) has taken part in very sly choice architecture. Speaking from my friends and I personal experiences, we've realized that all of a sudden we're using Snapchat a lot more than we used it a week ago. I know I kept a snap conversation going for longer than it needed to just because I wanted to see the fire emoji; cause I somehow wanted to prove that I could have a prolonged snap conversation with someone else. I didn't think about it when I was doing that, but I do realize that I generally have never tried to sustain snap conversations before now. For some reason it isn't enough anymore that this person is my friend and I love talking to them. Now, I also have to prove that I talk to them on Snapchat. Social media as a whole has added another layer to friendships. The interesting part to me is that we often don't even realize how our relationships are being manipulated by the social medias we use. Does it really mean I have no friends if it says I currently have no best friends on snapchat? Of course not. I might have just been busy for two days and didn't use Snapchat. However, do I feel like I always need to have at least one best friend on Snapchat at all times? Sadly, based on my drastic increase in the use of Snapchat over the past week, I think I believe I do. Our real feelings and emotions are so tied to what's happening with our social media profiles ( queue the girl who feels empowered because she has a high amount of Hunger Games sparks). This is great for Snapchat. I'm sure many users are more actively using Snapchat than they did  just a week ago. I wonder if they also realized that their active users reduced when people had no way of seeing anyone else's activity. I wouldn't be surprised if it did. It's honestly sad to think that I care so much about things that don't really affect my real relationships with anyone. I don't necessarily think that the new emoji system is bad; I'm just disheartened by how greatly this seems to affect people.

http://www.readunwritten.com/2015/04/06/emoji-best-friends-snapchat-updates-ruining-relationships/