Adding Stories: Five Updates a Week

My own circle has been in the Colloquies beta for the better part of a year. A few months ago, without anyone deciding to, we started dropping photos into the hallway, the always-on side channel next to the weekly prompt. A blurry one of someone’s kid mid-tantrum. A new desk. A trail somewhere in the Alps with a caption that was just three exclamation marks. Nothing that needed a reply. I noticed I looked forward to them, some weeks, more than I looked forward to the prompt I’d built the whole app around.

So the idea arrived the way most product ideas do, which is obvious in hindsight and slightly embarrassing. These photos want to be their own thing. People want a place to show what’s going on in their life without it getting buried under a poll about Thursday. They want stories.

And then the second thought, the one that kept me from writing a line of code for a while: every app already has stories, and I left most of those apps on purpose.

What “stories” turned into everywhere else

The format started as something lovely. A photo from your day, gone tomorrow, no pressure to make it permanent. Then the mechanics arrived. The 24-hour timer that quietly punishes you for not posting today. The streak counter that turns a friendship into a number you can lose. The little ring around the avatar that says new, which is really the same red badge in a friendlier coat.

The research on this is grim in a specific way. When two researchers in Belgium surveyed nearly 2,500 early adolescents about Snapchat streaks, they found the streaks were tangled up with problematic phone use and fear of missing out, and that the kids who kept the most streaks felt the most obligation to keep them. A separate study watching how teenagers actually maintain streaks found a whole vocabulary of empty gestures: the “streak snap,” the mass-sent black photo, the “good morning” picture of a ceiling fired off to a dozen people purely to beat the clock. The communication had been hollowed out until only the timer was left.

That is the version of stories I did not want to build. A daily obligation dressed up as connection, billed by the day, that leaves you feeling behind on the people you love most.

The math says you don’t need to post every day

Here is the part that gave me permission to slow it down. The pace that mainstream apps demand is wildly out of step with how many people you can actually be close to, and how often closeness actually needs feeding.

Robin Dunbar’s work on the structure of our relationships keeps finding the same nested shape. A handful of people in the innermost layer, a slightly larger ring beyond them, and so on outward, each layer needing less of you than the one inside it.

Innermost

~5

Close friends

~15

Friends

~50

Wider circle

~150

Robin Dunbar's layered ego-network research (support clique ~5, sympathy group ~15)

The inner layers are tiny. And the way you stay in them isn’t volume, it’s rhythm. The encouraging finding underneath all this is that the updates don’t have to be big to count. Researchers studying what they call ambient awareness found that a trickle of small, peripheral updates is enough to build genuine knowledge of someone’s life. In their study, most people could recognize and describe contacts they knew only through these light, fragmented signals, without a single one-to-one conversation. Small things, kept up, accumulate into knowing someone. This is the same reason a friendship runs on a rhythm rather than on intensity. You don’t need a daily performance. You need a steady, low pulse that says I’m still here, this is my week.

The objection I have to take seriously

There’s a real one, and waving it away would be dishonest, because it cuts at the whole premise.

A feed of other people’s lives can make you feel worse, not closer. The cleanest evidence is a pair of studies from Ethan Kross’s lab: when people passively consumed others’ updates on Facebook, their mood dropped over the following hours, and the thing doing the damage was envy. Not screen time in the abstract. Comparison. You watch the trail in the Alps and the new desk and the kid, and some quiet part of you tallies it against your own ordinary Tuesday. A stories feature is, structurally, a feed of other people’s lives. I would be building the exact machine that does this.

I sat with that for a while, because the people most likely to use a friendship app are not immune to it. If anything they’re the ones already prone to feeling behind.

What changed my mind was where the harm actually lives. A 2024 meta-analysis of 141 studies, covering roughly 145,000 people, found that passively watching others is linked to worse emotional outcomes in general social-media settings, but that this effect does not hold inside groups. Active sharing, meanwhile, tracks positively with feeling supported.

Active sharing ↔ feeling supported

r = .34

Active sharing ↔ wellbeing

r = .15

Active sharing ↔ positive mood

r = .11

Passive use ↔ feeling supported

r = .15

Godard & Holtzman (2024), meta-analysis of 141 studies, ~145,000 participants

The envy machine is a property of large, public, ranked feeds full of people you half-know and strangers you don’t. It is not an inevitable property of a few honest updates shared into a closed room of people who already love you. The trail in the Alps lands differently when it’s from someone whose call you’d pick up at 2am. That distinction isn’t a loophole. It’s the entire design.

What I actually changed

So I built stories, and then I took the timer apart.

They stay up for seven days, not twenty-four hours. A week is slow enough that nobody has to catch yours today, and slow enough that there is nothing to perform. You post your week when you have a week worth posting. You can put up five in a week, and no more. The cap isn’t a limitation I apologize for. It’s the point. Five forces each one to mean something, and it quietly kills the grind of posting for the sake of the counter. There is no streak. There is no red ring engineered to panic you. They go to your circle, the small group of people you chose, never to an audience.

This is part of why I keep pulling features apart instead of adding to them. The same instinct that made me want an app that doesn’t fight for your attention, or that made me sceptical of the group chat that never sleeps, made me distrust the version of stories I’d inherited from everyone else. The job was never to manufacture a daily reason to open the app. It was to let five people stay loosely woven into each other’s weeks without anyone having to work at it.

What I’m still not sure about

I don’t know if seven days is right. I don’t know if five is the number, or if it should be three, or seven. I picked them because they felt like the pace of a real friendship rather than the pace of a platform, but feelings are not data, and the friends in my beta will tell me soon enough if I got it wrong.

What I’m fairly sure of is the question underneath it. For years the unspoken goal of these apps was to help you keep up with everyone, every day, forever. Maybe that was never the thing worth wanting. Maybe the quieter goal, the one that’s harder to put a counter on, is to not lose the handful of people you’d never want to lose. Being kept current and being kept close turn out to be different things. I built one app trying to chase the first and ended up wanting, more than anything, the second.

Hero image by Austin Ban on Unsplash.