Instagram Stories is establishing itself as a viable alternative to Snapchat, hitting 100 million daily views a mere two months since it was introduced.
Despite openly borrowing the temporary social-sharing feature from its younger rival, Instagram seems to have benefited from its existing audience of 500 million monthly active users. The photo-sharing app’s CEO Kevin Systrom revealed the stats on Thursday, which also happened to be Instagram’s sixth anniversary, as part of a BuzzFeed report.
Systrom has never shied away from the controversy that surrounded his app’s plagiarism of Snapchat’s pioneering Stories feature. Both apps allow users to share images and videos that auto-play in a slideshow format, and are only available for 24 hours before disappearing. The 32-year-old addressed the elephant in the room once more, this time with added confidence, stating: “Forget about pride of authorship, internally or externally — it’s working.”
Systrom also detailed the company’s efforts to integrate an ephemeral feature into its app. Initially, Instagram added a check box that allowed for the sharing of temporary photos on a user’s profile. According to Systrom, the idea was scrapped as it simply didn’t resonate during the test phase. Instead, it was decided that ephemerality had to exist outside of the app’s traditional user profiles, which have become a place for periodic uploads of photo and video highlights.
Even though the app did not release official viewership numbers until now, it became immediately clear that Instagram’s users had embraced Stories. In a matter of weeks, brands were producing stories on a regular basis. Meanwhile, Instagram maintained a steady stream of updates, including the ability to auto-save stories, and the introduction of recommended stories in the app’s Explore tab.
Another indication of the feature’s success came earlier this month, when it was revealed that Instagram’s parent company Facebook was testing its own version of the feature on its Messenger platform in Poland — proving once again that when it comes to social media, you can never have too much of a good thing.
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?