Giving credit where it’s due, if nothing else, Snap Inc (NYSE:SNAP) — parent company of Snapchat — has made rivals like Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) and Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) better by injecting some new competition to the mix. Though Facebook boasts more users and Twitter is starting to turn an actual profit, investors have quietly cheered for the newcomer, whether or not they owned SNAP stock.

Calling a spade a spade, though, Snap hasn’t done itself any favors. From ill-advised decisions to seemingly contradictory maneuvers, the company has given the market plenty of reason to steer clear of Snap stock.

It doesn’t seem things have changed on that front as we head into the thick of 2018.

Here We Go Again

The latest chapter of the sordid saga: Snap is laying off at least a couple dozen employees, half of which were producing content from New York and London.

It’s not clear exactly what this means for the company’s content ambitions. Snapchat publishes video from established news-oriented outfits like NBC, CNN and Buzzfeed, but also curates user-submitted content to create something exclusive it can deliver to users — primarily through Discover. That’s the same Discover, by the way, that 80% of the app’s user ignore, as explained by The Daily Beast earlier this month. While some of the remaining members of the content team will relocate to the company’s hometown of Venice, California, while new team members are reportedly going to be brought on board, investors may be wondering if the entire effort was simply misguided from the beginning.

It wouldn’t be the first time CEO Evan Spiegel and Snapchat’s top brass were wrong about what was marketable. In early November, Snap booked a $40 million charge to account for stunningly weak sales of its camera/glasses called Spectacles. Just a month earlier, Spiegel was touting how strong sales of Spectacles were.

There’s also the not-so-small matter of the app’s redesign, which has so far been jeered.

Most U.S. users have yet to see the reworked interface, but in the countries where it’s been officially launched, it’s been poorly received. A whopping 83% of the feedback about the new look and navigation has been negative.

Flawed Model?

To be fair, Snap had little choice but to at least try to make changes.

Running a platform that allows for easy exchanges of text messages and embellished pictures isn’t much of a business model. Advertisers want — and will only pay for — higher quality engagement than that. That’s what the content found at Discover and the revamp of Stories (no longer can you flip directly from one story to the next) were meant to do. Vice President of Content Nick Bell flatly conceded just a few days ago that the rework “will give far more prominence to premium content and far more real estate to premium content.”

Problem is, the harder you push premium content and the much-needed advertising revenue it brings, the less interested users become. The less interested users are, the less interested advertisers and partners become.

Perhaps tellingly, CNN has bowed out of its video partnership with Snapchat just four months after starting to provide content for the platform.

With that as the backdrop, something Raymond James analyst Aaron Kessler said as he was downgrading SNAP stock this past week resonates a little more than it otherwise might. He opined that Snap was just an “overvalued chat company.” It’s a problem simply because chat apps “historically don’t monetize as well as newsfeeds.”

Discover isn’t faring much better in terms of drawing a much-needed crowd.

Underscoring this idea that less is more is a recent decision from Facebook to inject more personal conversations from friends into the primary feed and push less content from media sources into the mix. Facebook, however, can afford to make such a switch. Snapchat lacks the scale or the credibility with advertisers — who still see Snapchat as an experiment — to make that happen.

There just may not be room in people’s lives for another social media venue.

Bottom Line on SNAP Stock

None of this is to suggest Snapchat won’t be around for a while. If nothing else, the name is worth owning, even if its current results can’t keep the company in operation.

By and large though, the never-ending indecision is morphing into anxiety. This has become a company that’s now not sure what works and what doesn’t and is throwing a bunch of spaghetti on the wall — not so much to see what sticks, but on hopes that any of it will stick.

So far, little of it besides the actual chat and picture-sharing tool has. It’s difficult to imagine any of that spaghetti sticking in the foreseeable future too.

And desperation is the last thing any SNAP stock owners want to see here.

As of this writing, James Brumley did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities. You can follow him on Twitter, at @jbrumley.