If you don’t follow Pitt Snaps on Snapchat, you’re missing out. You never know what snap you’ll find when you click Pitt Snaps Snapchat story: “that kid” who dozes off in class, a car flipped over, the pizza boxes from Friday night covering the sidewalk, a bed in one of the dorm’s bathrooms, or many, many nudes (we’re not exactly fans of those). Anyone can submit one of their Snapchat photos to Pitt Snaps—all you have to do is friend them on Snapchat and message them the photo! The students of Pit may never know who’s behind this infamous account, but we got an exclusive interview with these notorious snappers.
HC: What year at Pitt are you?
Pitt Snaps: Most of us on the Pitt Snaps team graduated already. We do still hang out with people from school, though. We wanted this to be our last hurrah before some of our friends moved away.
HC: How did you decide to create Pitt Snaps?
Pitt Snaps: Over the summer, a friend and I were drinking and he showed me something pretty cool that was similar and we just decided to create it. A bunch of my friends were on the track team at the time and we all got together and just decided to do it at 4 o’clock on the morning on a summer night. We were all graduating and we figured it’d be something to do for the hell of it. We waited for August when the students got to campus.
HC: How does Pitt Snaps work in terms of putting people’s submissions onto the story?
Pitt Snaps: You just send it in and then we repost it. It’s basically like a retweet. (Side Note: HC Pitt still doesn’t quite understand how it works, but we digress!)
HC: Is there a team of people behind Pitt Snaps or is it just one individual?
Pitt Snaps: It depends on every other week and who wants to do it, but we have about four people. We all login to the account with a really complicated password that we just shared with friends so they can login.
HC: What is the funniest Snapchat you’ve received/your favorite Snapchat?
Pitt Snaps: I don’t really get to see a lot of them. I only go on it occasionally, but some of the funny ones are in the classroom because it reminds me of being back at Pitt with certain professors. The ones from late at night with drunk people, like 21 year old birthday Snapchats of people being so stupid are always funny. Then they wake up in the morning like “ooohh.”
HC: About how many submissions do you receive a day?
Pitt Snaps: So Snapchat has a weird 30 snap limit. If we receive 100 a day and don’t check it, we can only see the last 30 that we received. So from midnight to 2 am I can only see the most recent 30 snaps. If it’s a Tuesday night and no one’s submitting then we’ll see all of them. All of the snaps get sent to a server, but some of them expire after you get too many.
HC: How many views do your Snapchat stories get each day?
Pitt Snaps: They get about 1,000 views per minute and about 4,500 views per 12 hours. When the Snapchat story expires, we have about 5 grand views.
HC: How do you choose which Snapchat submissions to feature on your story?
Pitt Snaps: We pick and choose because people can be dumb. We respect people’s privacy, but I’m not going to post a photo where someone’s roommates are getting dressed in the background. We’re not going to post that. We get a lot of random and weird stuff, so we don’t like to put that stuff on there.
HC: Do you guys ever get complaints for any of the photos that you post?
Pitt Snaps: It isn’t supposed to be an invasion of privacy. People will get really drunk and then once they realize the photo they submitted, they send a message asking us to not post it. We’re totally okay with that. We had one person who was getting dressed when their roommate took a photo and posted it and the person in the photo asked us to take it down. We will do that for anyone, but we do need to know what photo it is exactly, so make sure to specify! We’re not in this for any other reason just to have fun, so if you don’t like something and you don’t want to see it, we’ll totally take it down. We’re very cool with it and all you have to do is send a message! If you ever put a phone number or twitter handle on the Snapchat you send us, we’re not going to broadcast that or advertise it. This is just something for fun; we’re just normal people.
If you don’t already, friend Pitt Snaps on Snapchat for some laughs! The Snapchat username is “Pitt.snaps.”
Photo Credit: All Snapchat photos provided by Pitt Snaps. Each photo is an old submission that has been featured on the story!