[N.B. I originally write this story on Medium, here, and I'm copying it as my first Steemit test. Coincidentally, last year I tried to convince Medium to do what Steemit's doing , only to be rejected with extreme prejudice.]

Snapchat found a unique formula for blending and turning a social network into a commercial broadcasting company, by way of video, Stories, and Live. They realized “Content is King.”[Caveat: I’m not a big Snapchat user, though I have been playing around a lot with it lately and I’m a big fan of how they’re doing what they’re doing.]

Snapchat controls search

The network itself is not very accessible outside your contacts: there is no browsing and there are very limited options for searching. It’s not easy to find someone. Unintuitively(!), this is a good thing:

It de-emphasizes friend/following/follower relationships and counts (for the passive user).
It emphasizes content, by making anyone you did manage to find in the network seem like a rare gem — and it usually is — something you found serendipitously, by word-of-mouth, virally, etc.

Snapchat controls premium content

With short-lived Stories and Live, Snapchat found a sweet spot in between Vine and Periscope: shorts are nice, but they need to be stitched together; live is nice, but quality content is king.And, Snapchat managed to avoid Twitter’s tragedy of the commons: As user Stories keep growing and gems naturally emerge, Snapchat’s also offering a limited number of (high-demand) premium brand-produced(?) Stories channels and Snapchat-produced(?) Live channels.Snapchat’s a social network running a broadcasting business, and they’re in the early days of learning how to be this new kind of broadcasting company!

— joe