"Not my Snapchat memories!!"

a short look at why this is a big deal for many.

Oct 02, 2025

Snapchat is and always has been one of the best casual looks into human psychology.

It’s an app that many consider cringe or childish, yet if you were to log in to Snapchat and click “Connect my Contacts”, almost everyone from 20 to 70 has an account…complete with the green light symbol that denotes recent activity.

Imagine having Snapchat past the age of 21 rings out in many a self-righteous tweet, to which I would respond “Yeah I can, because almost everybody does”.

A Brief Inquiry into Disappearing Images

Early Snapchat was pure chaos.

For the younger readers, yes it’s true- you did used to be able to see other people’s top friends lists.

It went exactly how you’d expect.

I spent many an early-20’s Sunday morning in Snap marathons with a couple friends, covering our tracks.

“Dude I think if we send like 5 more each, it pushes her outta my top 5”

It was anxiety-inducing and frustrating then, absolutely hilarious to look back on now.

I’m sure for the younger generation, having an app that was centralized upon sending disappearing images for the receiver’s eyes only during your formative years went exactly how you think it would.

Think “mid-aughts PTA moms with AIM chat printouts” on Dianabol.

(It caused enough of a ruckus amongst legal, college-aged adults, too)

Snapchat has progressed as any big app does, introducing subscriptions, creators, and interactive stories.

However, its biggest calling card was arguably its Memories feature which, up until about 2 days ago, was free.

This has not gone over well.

Many who read this are probably like, well you can just have photos and videos in your phone, on iCloud…what’s the BFD?!

Ahh..let’s break it down.

“Close Friends” and Casual Freedom

Instagram was always the '“for show” app.

A highlight reel, a perfectly curated (and edited to death) showcase of people’s lives.

You can scroll through a person’s IG feed and think that they have the ideal life.

Take a scroll through that very same person’s Snap memories and you might think they’re a total degenerate unfit for polite society.

Why the divide between the two?

Well, take Snap for what it is. It was meant to be pictures sent to a select audience that self-delete in 5 or so seconds, Mission Impossible style.

(To quickly address the elephant in the room, yes. There’s a lot of 🌶️ activity going on on Snapchat. We’ve all done it. Not going to delve into that today, but yeah, Snap def has “alternative utility”, it’s like the unwritten rules in baseball.)

Anyway!

Would you send a picture of the mess you made when you overfilled a saucepan with quinoa and it went everywhere?

Probably not.

We know how that convo goes:

“Oh no, did you clean it up? By the way, are you coming to XYZ’s next week for the…” and now you’re in a conversation you don’t want to have.

This is where Snap is brilliant.

Quick 4 second shot “lmk if you’re in the mood for quinoa😭” caption, boom, send.

Casual. Quick. No need for a follow up.

It’s a way to share little moments without the residual digital water cooler talk afterwards.

The impermanence is liberating.

Doubling down on that, Snapchat was the first app to introduce a “Close Friends” feature, which is exactly what it sounds like.

People loved this feature, women especially.

Maybe 800 people got to see the cute outfit mirror selfie before you went out, but only a select handful got to see the 2AM girl’s bathroom drunken singalongs, or your best friend falling out of the Uber with the timestamped filter of 4:08 AM emblazoned over the video.

(I’ve been added to more than a couple close friends lists, I’ve done the field work here- it also gets a lot worse than that💀)

Snapchat has always been digital authenticity wrapped in a yellow Ghost icon.

Add in the fact you could store these cathartic acts of true self to an in-app personal library, and it’s not hard to understand Snap’s mass appeal.

That’s exactly why the new “payment to access Memories” has caused such an issue.

Money= Violation

Snap released a public blog post regarding the changes, with a quote that stuck out to me: “It’s never easy to transition from receiving a service for free to paying for it”.

This is what I believe is the sticking point for many who are upset by this.

The sliding scale to pay for Snap+ isn’t very expensive. For the majority of users, it’ll run ~ $4/month.

It’s the principle of the matter.

As a collective society, we’re sick of being digitally nickel-and-dimed.

Take any random autumn Thursday like today ~four years ago, and your digital realm was simpler.

Netflix? I’m sure a friend or family member has a login for you.

Now, they have device limitation and screening process that would make Kim Jong Un blush.

Football fan? Major network TV had Thursday Night Football- now you better pony up for Prime Video or watch on a 20 second delay with a 12 ad clickthrough process on Methstreams.

It’s digital death by a thousand cuts, and people are rightfully sick of it.

Coupling this with the emotional aspect of the fact most people’s Snap memories are a personal journal of friends, family, follies, and “my eyes only” absurdity that they hold near and dear, you begin to understand why something seemingly so trivial has ruffled so many feathers.

The Guys vs. The Girls

Ever since Snap announced the Memories news, TikTok has been alight with how-to’s on storing your memory backlog elsewhere.

Some are paying The Man and upgrading, some are picking and choosing what they want and taking them over to iCloud.

All parties are feverously poring through their Memories, though.

We’re pretty forward thinking about intersexual and intrasexual dynamics around here for the most part, but that being said…stereotypes don’t exactly fall out of the sky.

It’s been amusing to see how the guys and the girls are handling this.

More than a couple girls I know personally have gone back at their digital diaries, and with the same oddly endearing solipsism that consists of dividing eras of their life into hair colors.

“This happened when I had blonde streaks!”

“I had so much fun when my hair was black, I should go back to it”

It’s annals of mirror selfies, balayages (back when those were huuuge), blonde streaks, and nightlife chaos.

For the boys, it’s more of togetherness via destruction.

2AM holes being put in drywall, garage doors being taken down, Bills Mafia-esque launches onto BP tables…glorious youthful idiocy encapsulated with the exact time and date to boot.

I’m not exempt to this by any means- if I had a dollar for all the cumulative property damage done in my personal Snap archives, I could buy you all Snap+ into the 2030’s… but we’ll leave it at that.

Whether it’s the girls reminiscing over back when they were curating their own “VSCO aesthetics” or the video you snuck of your boy’s unhinged 3 in the morning political rant while you and your crew huddled around some living room TV watching “Zlatan Ibrahimovic: Best Goals and Skills” on YouTube during uh… “iPad Time”.. almost all of us have bizarre, sometimes incriminating, but always touching memories stored in the fateful yellow app.

Touching Grass and Putting It All Together

I get that this might have read dramatic, especially to older demo’s.

“It’s just pictures on the phone, dude”.

I’d push back on that.

Previous generations had scrapbooks, pictures developed and stored with care, family heirlooms passed down.

Millennials, Gen-Z, and now Gen Alpha are going to be the first groups to have their most formative, memory-forming years encapsulated almost entirely digitally.

When that landscape changes, it can be jolting- especially if it hits you out of nowhere.

So if you’ve got a friend or loved one spiraling over the fact that they’ve gotta keep paying up for access to the records of their 2017 house-parties-wearing Vans era or their late-night belting out Tekashi 69 in the back of a Lyft on the West Side Highway video catalog, be cool about it.

It’s how they let loose, it’s how they stored the lighter, more sensitive moments.

The bright side?

The only reason people find this update maddening and there’s such an uproar is because the memories stored in Snap are also stored in their hearts and brains- and they mean a hell of a lot more there.

You can’t strip someone of lived experience.

Last I checked, you didn’t need a subscription plan to access your own mind.