Case Study 11-2: Snapchat's "Best Friends" Feature —...

Background

Snapchat launched in 2011 with a single, distinctive proposition: photographs and videos that disappeared after being viewed. The ephemeral format was initially attractive because it reduced the permanence stakes of sharing — a casual selfie did not have to be a carefully curated statement that would exist on your profile forever. Users, particularly adolescents and young adults, responded enthusiastically. By 2012 the app was processing millions of snaps per day; by 2014, it was among the most-used applications on smartphones worldwide.

But Snapchat was not merely a messaging application. From early in its development, it incorporated social hierarchy features that made the social dynamics of its user base visible in ways that were, in retrospect, predictably consequential. None of these features was more psychologically loaded — or more responsible for adolescent social anxiety — than "Best Friends."

The Best Friends feature, present in Snapchat from its earliest iterations, displayed publicly the three (later eight) people with whom a user most frequently exchanged snaps. When you visited someone's profile, you could see their Best Friends list: a ranked display of their top Snapchat relationships, calculated by message frequency. The feature was visible not just to the user but to anyone who visited their profile.

This visibility seems, in retrospect, like an extraordinary design choice. It made a private social metric — who you communicate with most — into a public display that could be examined by anyone in your social network. It turned the question "Am I important to this person?" into a question with a publicly verifiable answer.

Timeline

2011–2012: Launch and Early Best Friends Snapchat launches with the Best Friends feature present from the beginning. Initially, the list shows the top three most-communicated contacts. The design rationale, as Snapchat founders later described it, was to highlight the most important relationships on the platform and make them easily accessible. The feature is described internally as a convenience tool: your best friends are one tap away.

What Snapchat does not fully anticipate is how the feature will function in the social dynamics of its primary user base. For adolescents, the Best Friends list immediately becomes a social signal. Who is on someone's list? Who should be on it and isn't? Why have you dropped off someone's list since last week? The feature designed for convenience functions socially as a display of relational hierarchy.

2012–2014: The Anxiety Escalates As Snapchat's user base grows and skews younger, the social dynamics around Best Friends intensify. Users report checking others' Best Friends lists compulsively. Romantic partners examine each other's lists for signs of infidelity. Friend groups parse lists for evidence of social displacement. The feature designed to surface your most important relationships is surfacing, with equal clarity, your fears about your own social position.

Social media reporting documents numerous examples of the feature causing adolescent distress. A teenager discovers that their best friend's Best Friends list features someone else in their spot. A user realizes they can see that their romantic partner's most frequent Snapchat contact is someone they don't recognize. In each case, the feature that made social hierarchy visible has made a privately held anxiety into a publicly confirmed fact.

School counselors begin reporting to parents about conflicts arising from Snapchat Best Friends dynamics. The feature becomes a recurring topic in adolescent therapy. In some documented cases, bullying and harassment is organized around Best Friends visibility — students deliberately manipulating their snap patterns to include or exclude specific people, and those inclusions and exclusions becoming a form of public social sanction.

January 2015: Best Friends Goes Private — Sort Of Facing growing criticism from parents, educators, and some mental health professionals, Snapchat updates the app to remove public visibility of Best Friends lists. Users can still see their own Best Friends — the top eight contacts — but they can no longer see other users' lists. The change significantly reduces the feature's function as a social hierarchy display.

The response to the change is instructive. Many users celebrate the removal of public visibility. But a significant segment of the user base — particularly the portion that had been using Best Friends visibility as a monitoring tool — expresses frustration. The transparency had, for some users, served a function: it gave them information they felt entitled to about their social connections. Removing it did not remove the underlying anxiety; it simply removed the data that had been feeding it.

2015–2016: FOMO Mechanics Reappear in New Forms In the period immediately following the Best Friends change, Snapchat introduces several new features that, while different in mechanism, serve similar FOMO functions:

The Snapchat Score — a cumulative number displayed on user profiles representing total snaps sent and received — creates a visible metric of Snapchat activity. Users begin competing to increase their scores and using others' scores as indicators of their relative engagement with the platform and with specific relationships.

Snap Streaks — counts of consecutive days of mutual snapping between two users — introduce a different kind of social hierarchy display and a powerful FOMO mechanic: the anxiety not of being left out of an event but of losing an accumulated streak. Research on streak anxiety documents adolescents going to significant lengths to maintain streaks while traveling, ill, or otherwise unable to engage normally with the app, and profound distress when streaks are broken.

2016: Stories and the Expiration FOMO Instagram launches Stories in August 2016, copying a feature Snapchat had developed in 2013. Snapchat's Stories format — twenty-four-hour ephemeral content visible to all followers — had already demonstrated the FOMO power of expiring content. Instagram's adoption of the format at massive scale amplifies the effect across a much larger user base.

The Snapchat Stories model thus becomes, through Instagram's adoption, one of the most widely deployed FOMO mechanics in social media history. The expiration timer that made Snapchat Stories feel urgent was not removed when the format migrated to Instagram; it was preserved as a core feature and A/B tested, refined, and optimized in its new home.

2017–2020: The Streaks Research Academic researchers begin to document the psychological effects of Snap Streaks. Studies find that streak anxiety is widespread among adolescent Snapchat users, that breaking a streak produces distress disproportionate to the objective significance of the event, and that the social pressure associated with maintaining streaks extends to behaviors well outside normal social media use — including having parents or siblings snap on one's behalf when one cannot, and keeping streaks going with people one no longer wants to communicate with, purely to avoid the social cost of losing the streak.

Researchers describe streaks as a "commitment device" that has been weaponized: something designed to encourage habitual engagement has created a form of social obligation that users feel unable to exit. The anxiety of losing a streak combines FOMO (the streak represented a valuable social connection) with loss aversion (losses loom larger than equivalent gains, per Kahneman and Tversky) to produce a powerful motivational force for continued engagement.

2021–Present: Ongoing Feature Evolution Snapchat continues to evolve its social hierarchy features. The Snap Map — which shows users' locations in real time to their contacts — introduces a geographical dimension to FOMO: users can see not just that friends are socializing but approximately where they are doing so. Friendship profiles, Bitmoji interactions, and status indicators continue to make social dynamics visible in ways that create comparison and monitoring opportunities.

The general pattern across Snapchat's feature history illustrates what this chapter calls the persistence of FOMO mechanics: specific features may be modified or removed in response to criticism, but the underlying design logic — making social hierarchy and social activity visible in ways that drive monitoring behavior — tends to be preserved and reintroduced in new forms.

Analysis

The Best Friends feature made a normally private and ambiguous social fact — who is most important to someone — into a public and precise display. The consequences were predictable from basic social psychology: making social hierarchy visible creates social anxiety, competitive behavior, and exclusion monitoring.

What is striking about the feature's history is not that it caused harm but that the harm was so comprehensible from first principles. Any developmental psychologist, school counselor, or educator who worked with adolescents could have predicted that displaying ranked friendship lists on the profiles of teenagers would produce exactly the kind of social anxiety and relational conflict that was subsequently documented. The knowledge required to make this prediction was not esoteric or technical; it was the ordinary knowledge of anyone who works with young people.

This raises a question that is relevant throughout this textbook: what kinds of expertise were present in the room when the Best Friends feature was designed, and what kinds were absent? The feature appears to have been designed by engineers and product managers optimizing for engagement metrics, without systematic input from developmental psychologists, school counselors, or others whose professional knowledge would have flagged the predictable harms.

The Pattern of Removal and Reinvention

The removal of public Best Friends visibility in 2015 and the subsequent introduction of Snap Streaks illustrates a pattern that recurs throughout social media history: when a specific FOMO mechanic generates enough negative attention to require modification, it is typically modified — but the underlying design logic that generated it is preserved and expressed through a new feature.

This pattern suggests that the issue is not specific features but the design philosophy that generates them. A philosophy that prizes engagement metrics above other values will repeatedly produce features with FOMO mechanics, because FOMO mechanics are highly effective at driving engagement. Removing one such feature without changing the underlying philosophy produces another.

The behavioral economics concept of "local vs. global optimization" is relevant here. Removing Best Friends public visibility was a local optimization — a specific fix to a specific problem. The global optimization — the underlying objective of maximizing engagement — was not changed, and so it continued to produce locally problematic features. Genuine harm reduction at the platform level would require a change in the global objective, not merely local feature modifications.

Streaks as a Novel FOMO Mechanic

Snap Streaks deserve attention as an innovation in FOMO design. Traditional FOMO is organized around events: you are missing something happening now. Streak FOMO is organized around continuity: you have built something (a streak) that will be lost if you do not act within a specific time window. This is a different psychological mechanism — one more closely related to loss aversion than to social exclusion — that achieves similar behavioral results (habitual engagement) through a different emotional pathway.

The streak mechanic also introduces a social obligation dynamic absent from most other FOMO features. You do not merely feel anxiety about what you are missing; you feel anxiety about letting down the other person in the streak. The dyadic nature of streaks means that breaking one affects not just you but also your streak partner, creating guilt-based motivation in addition to loss aversion-based motivation. This multi-emotional pressure may explain why streak anxiety appears to be particularly resistant to rational override — knowing that a streak is "just an app" does not make the obligation feel less real.

Implications for Design Ethics

The Best Friends case raises fundamental questions about the ethics of making social dynamics visible through product design. There is a meaningful difference between enabling social connection (allowing people to communicate, share, and engage) and making social hierarchy legible (displaying ranked lists of relationships, streak counts, and activity indicators in ways that create comparison and monitoring opportunities).

The former serves users' interest in connection. The latter serves platform interests in engagement while creating social dynamics — hierarchy, exclusion, competition, monitoring — that adolescents in particular are developmentally ill-equipped to manage at scale.

A design ethics framework that takes user wellbeing seriously would ask, before launching any social hierarchy display feature: What social dynamics will this make visible? Who is most vulnerable to those dynamics? What happens to users who find themselves at the bottom of the visible hierarchy? These are not unanswerable questions — they are questions that developmental psychologists, educators, and mental health professionals could answer with reasonable confidence, if they were systematically consulted in product design processes.

What This Means for Users

The Best Friends and Streaks history offers several practical insights for users and those who support them:

Social hierarchy displays are design choices, not natural features of the social environment. Before Snapchat's Best Friends, there was no application that publicly displayed your ranked friendship list. This was a design choice, and it could have been made differently. Understanding that these displays are designed — rather than natural or inevitable — is a first step toward evaluating them critically.

Anxiety driven by social hierarchy displays is a predictable response, not a personal failing. If seeing that you are no longer on someone's Best Friends list produces distress, this is not evidence that you are unusually insecure. It is evidence that you are responding normally to a design that was calibrated to make social hierarchy visible in ways that trigger exactly this response.

The removal of a specific anxiety-producing feature does not mean the platform has changed its design philosophy. When Snapchat removed public Best Friends visibility, many users experienced genuine relief. But the introduction of Streaks shortly afterward demonstrates that the design logic had not changed — only its expression. Evaluating the ongoing safety of a platform requires attending to its design philosophy and its track record, not just the presence or absence of specific features.

Streaks create social obligations that are difficult to exit gracefully. If you are in a streak with someone you no longer want to communicate with, the streak mechanic makes that relationship difficult to exit without causing apparent harm to the other person. Recognizing this dynamic for what it is — a designed social trap — can help users navigate it with more deliberateness.

Discussion Questions

The Best Friends feature was described by Snapchat as a convenience tool. At what point does a "convenience" feature become a psychological hazard? Who should be responsible for making that determination?
The pattern of "remove a feature, reintroduce the same mechanic in a different form" suggests that external pressure alone cannot change platform behavior. What would need to change — in regulatory environments, in corporate incentive structures, or in design culture — to produce genuine change in how platforms approach FOMO mechanics?
Snap Streaks combine FOMO with loss aversion and social obligation. How do these multiple psychological mechanisms interact? Is the combination more powerful than any single mechanism would be alone, and if so, what does this suggest about multi-mechanic design?
Who is most harmed by social hierarchy display features like Best Friends? Consider dimensions including age, social position within peer groups, and pre-existing anxiety levels. What does this distribution of harm suggest about who benefits and who suffers from these design choices?
If you were a product designer at Snapchat in 2012, what would you have done differently with the Best Friends feature? What constraints — technical, business, or cultural — would have made your preferred approach difficult to implement, and how might those constraints have been addressed?

Case Study 11-2: Snapchat's "Best Friends" Feature — Social Hierarchy, Anxiety, and the Persistence of FOMO Mechanics