> “Think it would be interesting to investigate how healthy Snapstreak sessions are for users… If I open Snapchat, take a photo of the ceiling to keep my streak going and don’t engage with the rest of the app, is that the type of behavior we want to encourage? Alternatively, if we find that streaks are addictive or a gateway to already deep engagement with other parts of Snapchat, then it would be something positive for “healthy” long term retention and engagement with the product.”
For I second I thought this employee was talking about what's healthy for the user. Certainly not though; they mean what's healthy for the "user-base". I find very interesting how this sort of language leads to certain employee behaviour. Using the concept of "health" to mean retention and engagement, might overcast thinking about health from a user's perspective— it's similar terminology but very different, and sometimes even opposite, goals.
Bingo. If more people were carefully analyzing language, they could spot earlier that people are on the slippery slope of, lets call it, anti-human beliefs; as then they may help them to correct course.
If we don't, these narratives are getting normalized. A society is on a curve of collective behavior, there is no stable point. Only direction.
GitHub does the same thing with commits, displaying them on your profile. Is that remarkably different than what Snapchat is doing?
I'd say so. Some obsess over their commit history but it is mostly out of the way and only a representation of how active you are. The snapchat streaks are a key feature and designed to keep you coming back every day, you can even pay a dollar to restore it if you miss a day.