Instagram Stories diverges from Snapchat by suggesting whom to follow; company says 100M people visit the Explore tab every day
Context & Ripple Effects
Instagram launched Stories in August 2016 as a direct clone of Snapchat's format, and TechCrunch framed it at the time as the same playbook Facebook used when Subscribe slowed Twitter's growth (Facebook Subscribe precedent). Within weeks Kevin Systrom reported over 100M people using Stories daily, and by January analytics firms were measuring Snapchat Stories view counts falling 15–40% since the clone arrived.
Today's update changes what Stories is for: where Snapchat's version only shows friends, Instagram now suggests whom to follow from within Stories, and pairs it with an Explore tab drawing 100M daily visitors. That turns Stories from a sharing surface into a discovery engine — and by April Instagram claimed 200M daily actives, passing Snapchat's reported 161M DAUs.
First-order effects
- Creators and brands on Instagram gain a new audience-growth loop: every Story view can now convert into a follow, something Snapchat's friend-only Stories never offered.
- Snapchat loses the last structural distinction of its flagship feature — the copy now has a built-in recommendation layer feeding off Instagram's 100M-daily Explore traffic.
Second-order effects
- With organic reach eroding on the cloned format, Snapchat is pushed toward paying creators directly instead — later shipping creator subscriptions with custom monthly pricing and paid Memories storage tiers.
- Advertisers get a bigger, algorithmically curated Stories inventory on Instagram, pressuring Snapchat to defend the engagement metrics its ad business is priced on.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to social products converging on one structure: ephemeral content plus algorithmic follow-suggestions, where the platform with the larger discovery surface compounds network effects faster than the originator of the format.
- If follower-growth features keep migrating into formerly private feeds, creator economics shift from platform-native audiences to whichever app can promise discoverability — a dynamic regulators and antitrust watchers may eventually weigh as copying-plus-scale behavior.
The trend: Social apps are absorbing each other's formats while competing on the discovery layer around them, with Instagram's follow-suggestion engine showing that whoever controls recommendations — not who invented the feature — captures the growth.