A look at Messenger and Instagram features from 2016 that mimic Snapchat, such as Stories and ephemeral messaging, as Facebook tries to curb Snapchat's growth
Kurt Wagner / Recode :
Context & Ripple Effects
By the end of 2016, Facebook had rolled out a string of Snapchat lookalikes across its family of apps: Messenger Day tested ephemeral photo sharing in Poland, where Snapchat had little presence, and Messenger later added Snapchat-style filters including "3D masks". The pattern continued into the new year with ephemeral Stories being tested at the top of the News Feed in Ireland.
Recode's Kurt Wagner frames these launches as a deliberate strategy to blunt Snapchat's growth rather than isolated feature experiments — a reading that proved durable, as Facebook went on to copy Snapchat again within months, leaving its apps looking increasingly alike.
First-order effects
- Snapchat now faces competition from free imitations of its core format inside apps — Messenger, Instagram, and eventually Facebook itself — that already have far larger installed bases.
- Facebook's product teams shift from building original sharing formats to porting Snapchat's proven ones, making Stories and ephemeral messaging table stakes across every Facebook-owned surface.
Second-order effects
- Instagram's Stories adoption pulls time away from its own News Feed, creating an internal cannibalization problem for Facebook even as it succeeds against Snapchat.
- Snapchat is pushed to differentiate on features Facebook hasn't cloned yet, since the raw format alone no longer confers exclusivity once it ships inside higher-reach apps.
Third-order effects
- If the copying cadence holds — a fourth clone arrived by March 2017 — social apps converge on a shared feature set, and competition shifts from who invents formats to who has the distribution to normalize them fastest.
- The episode establishes feature-cloning as a viable defensive playbook for platform incumbents, raising the structural question of how smaller networks protect any format advantage at all.
The trend: Social platforms are converging on a single shared feature set as the largest incumbent clones rivals' formats faster than those rivals can build moats around them.