The S that people often send via Snapchat is short for ‘Streak,’ which is used to create engagement between different users. If you are asking ‘what does S mean on Snapchat’ you are either a new user or are someone who didn’t previously follow this heightened trend. It is an old trend, where you exchange snaps with your friends. Sometimes, instead of sharing a pictorial snap, people often send a snap with the letter ‘S.’
Snapchat is one of the oldest apps with temporary snaps as the main form of content on the platform. It was one of the most used social media applications once. But once other platforms started picking up on the ‘temporary snaps’, and adapted it onto their platforms, Snapchat’s audience dispersed.
The company, once thought likely to take over the social media giant Facebook, lost $945 million in 2020, even though there was a gradual increase in users. Owner and CEO, Evan Spiegel, had multiple opportunities to sell Snapchat to Facebook, but he declined. Soon after, Facebook-owned Instagram cloned the ‘Stories’ feature on the app, before Facebook itself brought it on.
There are some common questions we will be answering today, dedicated to the ‘S’ on Snapchat, what it means, how to use it and how it is generally used by the audience on the platform. Let’s get started.
How do you use S on Snapchat?
To start it off with an explanation, sending S to a friend or acquaintance on Snapchat is a way to start a thread of communication, with snaps going back and forth. Maintaining that thread by sending one snap to each other within 24 hours is how that works in general, but there’s no limit to how many snaps you can send. The app keeps the score of how many days it has been since your streak has started, and ranks your Snapchat friends based on how long your streak with them has been maintained.
If either of the people involved in a streak forget to send a snap within 24 hours, your streak breaks and you have to start all over again. There is a way you can undo a broken streak by talking to Snapchat Support in case it was a system-related issue. But in most cases, once it’s gone, you have to start from scratch.
In terms of the use of S or streak, there is no certain guideline or standard to maintain, since the main goal is to have fun with your friends on Snapchat. There are also different ways people write it, ‘S’, ‘streak’, ‘streaks’, ‘strx’, are all different versions of the same thing. Someone sending you a snap with any of the following in captions, stickers, or hand-drawn through the pencil tool means they want to start a streak thread with you.
It isn’t a necessary activity to take part in either because if you choose to not engage in it, that’s completely fine as well. Those that are interested in engaging with daily back and forth snaps, you can respond or send the S yourself to start the streak.
Snapchat – How to make it fun?
Onto making it fun, there are several ways in which you can utilize the streak activity to have fun with snaps. The journey from ‘what does S mean on Snapchat’ to ‘how do I have fun with it,’ is an entertaining one. As mentioned before, you can include the S of streak in the snaps in many different ways. It does not have to stay unchanged or keep to the S in the caption. Here are a few different ways you can do it.
- Starting with the basic way, you can simply snap a picture through a camera in Snapchat or you can upload a picture through the gallery option, and write whichever form of streak you want to go within written form. Your choices include, ‘S’, ‘streak’, ‘streaks’, and ‘strx’.
- You can play around with stickers available on the app, in the form of GIPHY or Bitmoji that is another fun feature of Snapchat. For a quick small review, Snapchat has a feature that allows you to create an Avatar of your own according to your physical features, that goes on your profile, and you get stickers customized to your Bitmoji as well. Those and other generic stickers of Snapchat have a lot of streak options you can look up through the search option. You can use either of those options to indicate it in your snaps.
- Filters are another, not so permanent feature that you can use for streaks. Snapchat has a lot of ever-changing and fixed filter options that you can apply to your snaps. There are some streak filters you can use for your thread. These are unlike face filters of Instagram, therefore you don’t need to necessarily send a picture of your face to use them. They’re more like frames on the snap, and they go over any kind of picture.
- Lastly, almost all story options in apps now have a pen or pencil feature that lets you draw over the snap you are sending. You might have seen many hand-drawn ‘S’ in pictures sent to you as streaks. There are different colors, brushes, and opacity options for you to play around with.
Alternatives to Snapchat?
While Snapchat has been fun and engaging for the most part, many who first started out with using it multiple times a day, have moved on to other apps now. It’s because the format and interface of the application are very focused on the medium of pictures and seem to restrict people due to its limited text options.
Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are more versatile in that sense because they have a wide variety of posting features, as well as options for versatile kinds of posting, such as long caption limits, story texts, etc. If you are someone who likes the story feature but are bored with Snapchat for any reason, there are alternatives you can go for. Here are some top applications that people use as alternatives to Snapchat:
- Tik Tok
- Wickr Me
- Telegram
- SnapSeed
- Cluster
- Imgur
This was all from our side for your question – ‘what does S mean on Snapchat.’ However, before we conclude, Snapchat might have a certain audience in decline, but it isn’t near being obsolete yet, since its young users are still gradually increasing every year. In the end, it depends upon your preferences and whether you have a reason to stay on the app that makes you stay or shift to other options.
