I'd say they can -- especially with the Gen Z group. Snapchat is used to produce videos, images, and texts for either: all your friends (stories), a select subset of your friends (private stories), a subset of that subset (subsequent private stories), specific friend groups, etc.

With TikTok, you're publishing to the world; with Snapchat you're publishing to your world.

well said -- There's a fundamental difference in TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc and Snapchat. Snapchat is heavily focused on private (one person, small private group) content in contrast with the other networks which mostly focus on public content.

> Snapchat is heavily focused on private (one person, small private group)

Private secondary Instagram accounts (finstas) for smaller circles and Instagram's "share only to 'close friends'" features are taking a lot of that Snapchat market over.

I still don't see Instagram used as a replacement for text messaging like Snapchat is for many people (again, just my experience in the college-age demographic). Snapchat themselves don't seem to want to be a messaging app though, probably because the path to ad revenue and real profitability is in an algorithmic feed.

Anecdotally, in my age group (College / new grads in Northeastern USA) Snapchat occupies a slightly different segment from TikTok (rant incoming...)

TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are all places where people share more public / curated content, whether that's a silly video you made, a meme, or a little more curated photo of something exciting you're doing. Regardless of the content, there's a big focus on reputation and superficial interactions (likes, comments, etc.)

In contrast, Snapchat is still extremely popular for private communication (group chats, private messaging). For many college-age people, Snapchat is closer to an alternative to text messaging -- people heavily use the editing and multimedia features in creative ways that you couldn't do with normal SMS (For example, drawing over an image, circling something, overlaying another image, typing out a sentence over an image). Snapchat still has a consistent user base here because they've continually focused on improving the chat features. One example of this phenomenon: Whenever I met new people in college, we exchanged 1) Phone numbers 2) Snapchat accounts, since those are the primary methods for private communication for many. My snapchat friends list is nearly 1:1 with my phone contact book for anyone I met socially.

Instagram competes with Snapchat (and is arguably winning) on any feature that focuses on public sharing, such as the "stories" feature -- And for good reason, since Instagram as a platform has been designed from the start around public sharing. Similarly, TikTok will definitely beat Snapchat on the curated public video content, because that's just never what Snapchat was good at.

Only time will tell whether the smaller user base that is hyper-loyal to Snapchat for private messaging is large enough to justify their insane valuation, but I don't think Instagram or TikTok have really captured Snapchat's core value in private messaging.

The popularity of widely-adopted social media apps tends to cycle with 4-8 year periodicity, roughly in line with high school / college cohorts. By that logic, Snapchat’s time is nearly up. TikTok will probably be popular for another 4 years until something else takes its place.