Over the past week or so, almost all of my friends have brought up the new Snapchat update at least once. While at first it just seemed to be an annoying re-formatting of the pages, I noticed a few days after the update that I was having a hard time viewing my friend's stories. Instead of seeing what my friends were up to, I was instead seeing snapchat stories from celebrities I wasn't following.

It seems like Snapchat has followed in the footsteps of Instagram and YouTube, beginning to favor larger, more famous content creators over smaller ones. While this helps users with a large follower base, it gives users trying to grow their platforms another annoying hurdle to overcome.

Instagram has been slowly making the shift towards an advertising-based platform, changing your feed to show you posts by the more famous people you follow. The new algorithm favors users who have already gown their following, If you don't have a large follower base that frequently likes and comment on your posts, the app won't feature you in other users' feeds. Instagram has also been implementing something known as "shadowbanning," when your post won't be featured under whatever hashtags you've included in the caption.

While Instagram won't explain their reasoning for this, users have found that if you place the same hashtags in every post, they'll be shadowbanned. But what if you're using Instagram to say, promote your handmade jewelry. You'd probably put #jewelry on most or all of your posts, but then those posts could end up being hidden from other users. At the moment, Instagram hasn't even told the public about shadowbanning, making it even more infuriating.

YouTube has also been making growth difficult for smaller users. From making monetization an option for users with only 1,000 subscribers or more to not featuring videos that are actually trending (the majority of the videos on the trending page are actually selected by YouTube and are often by the highest-earning YouTubers), YouTube has been turning into an unfriendly platform for smaller creators.

As with Instagram, it's unclear as to how YouTube thinks these changes will help the platform. YouTube has also made it increasingly difficult to gain ad revenue off of videos, only letting what they deem "family-friendly" content gain money.

Overall, it's uncertain as to if these platform updates will help them. While the outrage over the snapchat update has definitely gotten the app a good amount of free press (and I'm definitely guilty about tweeting my reaction to it), the majority of the public opinion on these new algorithms has been, for the most part, negative.

These new updates and algorithms might help users with a large follower base grow their internet fame, but for everyone else, they're just an annoyance.