Here’s The Best Way To Find Great Snapchatters

Your Snapchat feed began as an exciting and unpredictable visual adventure, but nowadays, the stories (mostly from your two closest friends) don't hold the same charm that they used to. If you need to inject some high-quality spontaneity into your Snapchat experience, check out Snap Stars, a new site that highlights some of the app's best users. Right now, Snap Stars features stories from roughly 50 Snapchat superstars, hand-picked and added by the site's founder Jacob Catalano. You can tap on a user's Snap to find out more about who they are, see a few sample stories, and get a very brief description of what you can expect if you follow that person. While you may want to check out crazy new stories from time to time, you may not actually want to follow a bunch of prolific Snapchatting strangers. To this end, Catalano plans to turn the site into an app called Story Star in a couple of weeks, according to an interview with Business Insider. The app will give you a place to view others' best snaps, without having them interrupt your actual Snapchat feed. You may wonder, Uh, why isn't Snapchat doing this on its own? While the company hasn't responded to Catalano's emails or blog post, it would seem that Snapchat's founders have a different vision for how you interact with the app in the future: They want Snapchat to be your source for news. If you go to the app's Discover tab now, it highlights accounts from news and media publications like CNN, ESPN, Food Network, and Vice — not other users. The company also recently hired of former CNN political correspondent Peter Hamby to head up its news division ahead of the 2016 election cycle. Of course, part of the joy of apps like Snapchat is that you get to choose how you use it and who to follow. So, as long as Snap Stars doesn't get a cease and desist, it can help you discover interesting stories or people — or get discovered yourself.