What I learned after taking over a 13-year-old's Snapchat account

"I thought it would be fun to go on everyone's accounts, but it's almost the end of the summer and I'm so happy because it was so annoying," said my sister's friend, Anna. "I did it because I wanted [my friends] to be happy when they came home [from camp] with bigger streaks with the people they care about."

This might not be true in all cases, but streaks become a measure of how much you like someone. When my sister's 16-year-old friend was interested in a boy from school, she told me that he must be interested too since they had well over a 100-day Snapchat streak. 

With so many streaks to keep up with, they send the quickest snapchats they can to their streaks. In my mind, to appeal to my younger audience, I thought I needed to jazz up my snapchats by adding stickers, cool drawers or filters, but I think I just came off looking lame to the teens I was snapchatting.

This is a feature I rarely use, but apparently it's big for teens. “Most of my friends text on Snapchat because it disappears,” my sister's older friend informed me. “You don’t have to worry about other people reading your messages and it saves space on your phone because it's not saving anything.” The only people she contacts regularly over text is her family. 

The few times my sister was allowed to check her phone at camp, I got a few of these encouraging texts. 

While my sister comes in at an embarrassing nine streaks, her friend hits 44 total streaks. “It’s how I keep in touch with my friends,” she said. “It’s a lot of friends that live far away so we just send pictures.” Meanwhile I can’t think of 44 people I would invite to my birthday party, let alone contact on a daily basis...

After two weeks on the job, having anxiety about snapchatting while in the middle of a night out with my friends, and feeling so guilty about losing my sister's longest streak, I was definitely ready to give up my role.