@ow thanks for the kind words! We've toned notifications down in SS2 to only be for reactions (1:1 messages) and friend joins. However, you can long press on anyone's stack of shots and turn on instant notifications for them if you're super into 'em. It's a huge change but really came from learnings and seeing how people were using SS1. Really excited to see this on Product Hunt — big fan @rrhoover.

@rrhoover — I think there were a couple things: Probably the biggest was that we took a bunch of risks in the first version, some which paid off and others that didn't. I guess this was less of a surprise as we totally understood going into it that you never get it right the first time but our goal here was to learn what was loved and learn what wasn't and pare it back from there. The more surprising learnings came from looking at the communities that were growing organically across the world (this may answer your question @msitver). For us, building these communities was far and away the most important thing — much bigger than raw numbers or any individual metric — and we were lucky enough to be able to reach out to them and see how they were using it and why it was meaningful to them. This really helped us refine a lot of our thinking around the product.

This version is very similar in concept to Tiiny. Except that images are bigger.

After playing with this for a little bit, I'm DIGGING it. Sharing images as stories (with the ability to get them out to social media) is awesome and actually works far better than Snapchat's own competing feature. Slingshot so much more sense than the original product. If anyone wants to try it, hit me on 'owenw' edit: The annoying part with this is with 'reactions' you still need to reply with a photo to friends. I imagine they'll implement something like Snapchat's actual chat thing later, but this is a bit tiring taking a photo to just put some text on it.