We would like to start by thanking everyone who joined, participated, and helped make an impact this past year. With a social platform like Snapzu, which is nearly entirely dependent on its community, our entire team could not be more grateful to all our active members who have contributed by posting, commenting, and voting. You really help shape Snapzu into the awesome place it is!

Summer of Snapzu:

As many of you know, this year we've welcomed many Reddit "refugees" seeking a similar (yet very different) place to post and share freely without censorship and with better privacy and more transparency. In early July we were caught completely off-guard with a large influx of new members after a series of events stirred up at Reddit. Most of you newer Snapzu members probably remember a slow and unstable website, largely because we were unprepared for such a huge amount of traffic in such a compressed period of time. All server issues have since long been addressed, and our infrastructure was updated to better deal with much more traffic down the road. For those turned off by the experience, we really hope that you can give us another shot.

Despite seeing all the new faces, growing a new web community has proven to be more difficult than originally anticipated. The network effect (also known as the "chicken and egg" problem) has been holding Snapzu at a critical disadvantage from day one, as it's proven really difficult to get (and more importantly keep) new users on board without already having a plethora of other active users. To get over this "catch-22" situation, we really depend on those of you that have been inactive can jump back in on the action. It doesn't take much to make a wave, just hop in a discussion, share a link... invite a friend. Anything helps!

Snapzu 2015 time line:

2015 brought us various new features in a few major updates. To keep things short and to the point, here is a general time line of events and a "tl;dr" summary about them. For more information just click on the link to be taken to each post.

Release 5.1 - (Feb 2015) brought several new tribe management tools and introduced the early access partnership referral program as a way to grow, expand, and manage your tribes, especially useful if you operate a blog and/or have significant influence in a subject or topic. Let your existing audience help you with content and keep them engaged much longer with our unparalleled community features.

Release 5.1.1 - (Jun 2015) was all about optimizing the social aspects of the website. Several design changes were made and additional functionality was added to make Snapzu easier to use, navigate, and understand.

Release 5.1.2 - (Sep 2015) introduced a number of improvements to managing and organizing all your posts and the ability to save all types of content.

In between the 3 major updates listed above, we have also posted several text posts explaining smaller (but still otherwise important) updates and fixes. To view those, you can check out the /t/blog tribe.

Snapzu 2015 stats:

Here's a few stats from the past year that may pique your interest:

Total new members: 13,159

Total submissions: 139,552

Total comments: 157,188

Total votes: 5,656,730

Total page views: 16,784,003

Again, big thanks go out to all the members that have contributed to the numbers above. Let's triple them (again) next year!

What to expect in 2016:

Due to the events in July, we were forced to postpone certain planned functionality to fix/update a number of back-end issues. We are however back on track with all originally planned development.

Mobile CSS: March 2016

API: Aiming for mid-2016

Credits/premium (+ referral program official launch): Aiming for mid-2016

Other minor planned functionality as previously outlined is still in the works, but several have also been delayed. We will post an update once we have more information to share.

See you in 2016:

As another year comes to a close and we reflect on all the events during the past 12 months, we can again proudly say that it was a big year for Snapzu and its great members. We may be a relatively small community (if compared to some of the big boys), but we are a strong and united one. Sometimes it's nice to able to remember some usernames and make some close friends with common interests.

More and more new members are joining all the time, but our small team could use an extra hand or two in spreading the word. For those of you who haven't had the time (or were otherwise unable) to check out all our features and what differentiates us from the other guys, be sure to check out our blog here. You may find yourself pleasantly surprised!

And with Reddit changing their privacy policy, effective January 1st 2016, along with the various opinions and concerns many of their users have expressed, this time around we will be fully prepared to welcome more of those who choose to look for an alternative community to become a part of. It seems that Reddit's long-time lack of competition has skewed their core values and how they do things lately. A little competition is always a good thing, and we are ready to bring it in 2016! Let's do it together.

Thanks for your time, have a great new year, and see you around on Snapzu!

• Team Snapzu