Signal Stories
When Signal launched a “stories” feature last year, my first thought was that it seemed pretty silly, almost a joke. A goofy, trendy social media feature launched on an encrypted messaging platform almost a decade after the trend.
But I gave it a shot because, let’s be real, I’m a huge sucker for new social media.
And it turned out I really like them! In contrast to 1:1 messaging, they provide opportunities for spontaneous interaction—people I haven’t talked to in years, people who don’t use other social media, people I haven’t had good excuse to chat with, etc.
I also came around to the idea that it’s good that we experiment with encrypted social media. I think a lot of people have objections to government and corporate surveillance but feel locked into platforms like Facebook because there aren’t privacy-first alternatives. Signal Stories aren’t going to replace Facebook. But they provide a nice proof-of-concept that this sort of thing is possible and fun. Plus “stories,” with their fleeting, disappearing nature, seem like a natural fit for Signal’s privacy- and security-focused model.
There was another bias in my initial reaction: While here in the U.S. Stories may seem like a goofy—maybe nice-to-have, maybe super annoying—feature, there’s other countries where people see them as something they simply expect from a messaging app. This didn’t occur to me until I read their excellent blog post this week.
It goes into some detail about how U.S.-centrism pervades tech product design and the ways that they’ve worked to resist that narrow focus in Signal. Really good food for thought—especially for me, just coming out of an eight week product management class.