Shots

~ the obit ~

Shots was built for teenagers who followed Justin Bieber. In 2013 i was closer to thirty than to that, a computer engineer in Ankara, and the celebrity-selfie app was never going to be my corner of the internet. But it deserves to be pulled out of the app-store graveyard, because the idea underneath it was smarter than the pop-star money made it look.

It launched on November 12, 2013 as Shots of Me, built by the brothers John and Sam Shahidi with a large early check from Justin Bieber, who had tens of millions of young fans and pointed them at it. The clever part was what the app refused to do. There were no public comment threads and no visible follower counts, because the founders had decided that most of the cruelty on social apps lived in exactly those two places. Front camera only. It was an anti-bullying network dressed as a selfie toy, and it got to roughly eight million users.

Good intentions did not out-engineer Snapchat. By 2016 the disappearing photos of one and the reach of Instagram had taken the oxygen a selfie startup needed, and Shots the app stopped growing. So the Shahidis did the thing that looks like death from the outside and like survival from the inside: they kept the audience and threw away the product. In October 2016 Shots became Shots Studios, a company that makes slick YouTube videos with the stars its app had helped mint, chief among them Lele Pons. The app went dark. The business walked away wearing a different suit.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the idea it was early on ~

The no-comments, no-counts design reads very differently in hindsight. Shots was arguing in 2013 that the like number and the reply box were where social media did its real damage, and it built a network that simply deleted them. A decade later, Instagram was letting people hide like counts and researchers were writing papers about exactly the harm Shots had tried to design out. It was right early, and being right early is worth almost nothing in an app store.

~ what happened to the audience ~

The strange, almost happy footnote is that the people did not disappear. The teenagers who came for a Bieber-backed selfie app are, in a sense, still there, watching the same faces in longer videos on a bigger platform. Shots Studios turned out to be the more durable idea than Shots itself. The grave here is only for the app. The audience it gathered never held a funeral, it just changed tabs.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »