1. Person with whom you only Snapchat with but don’t really have other kinds of communication
Since it takes about .01% of our brain cells to send a Snapchat, it has become the ultimate cop-out when it comes to communication. The days of sending messages with real words and thoughts are gone and replaced by videos of your racist grandmother and cats with crowns drawn on their heads. And with its record social media low of a 31-character limit that mostly isn’t even utilized, Snapchat is making us the laziest we’ve ever been. Snapchatting is noncommittal, and it’s even more noncommittal when it’s your only form of communication with someone. Be warned: Too much Snapchatting and not enough real-life chatting will make things really strange the next time you see this person in-person. You’ll feel like you’ve talked to them so much about so many things, but since no actual thoughts are being exchanged, Snapchat doesn’t count. The day Snapchat counts as communication is the day I throw my phone into a blender.
2. Person to whom you send your ugliest and most offensive Snapchats
Whether you’re giving yourself as many chins as the fat on your neck can produce, sticking your tongue out as far as it can go and displaying your strep-infested tonsils, or showing off your latest hearty bowel movement, nothing is off limits with this person. In your early days (when you were just learning the art), you’d sometimes be caught mid-Snap and would be forced to try to laugh off the deep shame that comes with being seen making that disturbing of a face. Now, you’ve become a shameless expert at making yourself as vile as possible in a matter of nanoseconds and writing an (in)appropriate caption to match. This person loves it, and appreciates the Repulsive You. They are #1 on your Snapchat Best Friends and the sole reason why you have an embarrassingly high number of Snapchat points.
3. Person who Snapchats you a lot but to whom you never respond
It’s the vague acquaintance, the ex-fling, the person you met once. For some reason, they’re always Snapchatting you, despite the fact that you never respond. Maybe you have nothing to say back, maybe you don’t know them well enough to send a good Snapchat, or maybe just plain creep you out. Regardless, they aren’t getting a response. I mean, Snapchat is kind of personal. It isn’t merely a “Hey” or a “What’s up?” via text, which is something that doesn’t require you to picture this person in your head and thus can easily be ignored. This is a personal photo of where they are or of what they’re doing or even of them that you have to look at because it’s the actual message, and your lack of response indicates that it is unwanted. They Snapchat you so often that you wonder if they even notice that you aren’t responding or that they’re Snapchatting you in the first place.
4. Person who Snapchats pictures/videos of people you don’t know
Snapchats, like all kinds of social media posts, should ideally be one or more of three things: 1) informative 2) funny or 3) interesting. If the social media post does not fall into any of these three categories, chances are it is not worth the post and the inevitable Post-Post Regret, a phenomenon that occurs when the user regrets putting something out onto the Internet and immediately removes it because it is boring or weird. Unfortunately, since one cannot act on their Post-Post Regret on Snapchat, there are far too many Snapchats out there that are uninformative, unfunny, and uninteresting. This category of people takes the cake for those kinds of Snapchats. You have never met this person’s sister, so watching a Snapchat of her break dancing and then messing up and laughing and trying to be cute isn’t entertaining (perhaps if she was really good, you’d be intrigued). Receiving a photo with a caption that may or may not be an inside joke between this person and about three people – none of whom are you – is just awkward. You won’t know how to respond, so you won’t do so. And then this person will fall quickly into the dreaded category #3.
5. Person who creates actual masterpieces
You know when you get a Snapchat from this person that it’ll be good. It is going to appear as though Picasso himself painted on a canvas of hilarious perfection, and will of course be complete with a clever caption and rainbows bursting out of your screen. This person uses the paintbrush feature so effortlessly and beautifully you wonder if they went out and bought a stylus. And the people who take their time to craft these Snapchat masterpieces know that what they’ve done is worthwhile because they’ve set their second limit to 30. You are okay with this.
6. Person who only sends hot selfies
We get it – this person’s hair looks nice today. I’m not talking about the girl who Snapchats a cute selfie here and there (amidst her double-chinned ones) when she’s dressed up nicely for an event and wants to show her friends. I’m talking about the girl who literally only spices up her boring hot selfie Snapchats by changing the caption to indicate what she’s doing (“At the city!” *cute photo of her in a matching beanie and scarf* “Doing homework :(“ *cute photo of her pouting with cute oversized glasses* “Snow!” *cute photo of her gasping because snow*) It’s pointless to open her Snapchats because you know they’re almost always just going to be her head tilted in the exact same manner and her skinny-arm extended at the exact same angle at her side.
7. Person from whom you only receive mass Snapchats
…Or do you? The mass Snapchat feels so impersonal. You never know if they sent you this because they thought of you and knew this particular thing would amuse you, or if they just mindlessly clicked your username on their endless list of Snapchat contacts. It almost irritates you to wonder whether they’re thinking about You, the Person or You, the Snapchat Username. You’re torn because you want to answer – and most of the time you do – but you also are silently cursing this person for making you feel falsely unique and special.
8. Person who Snapchat brags
People are notorious for bragging on all kinds of social media platforms, sometimes to nobody in particular and sometimes to hundreds of their “friends.” However, Snapchat bragging is unique in the sense that this person chooses specifically who they want to brag to, and the brag is complete with visuals that last for long periods of time. I’m interested in knowing the criteria for who gets to receive these brags. You understand that this person is having fun at their Hardwell concert, but it would probably just be better to post a photo album on Facebook to nobody in particular than send you, specifically, a sixty second video of blinding lights and a shadowy figure dancing with a vodka soda. At least with a Facebook album you can choose whether or not you want to click through the photos and nobody will know either way. On Snapchat, it’s known if Snapchats are opened or not. And you’re just mean if you don’t at least pretend like you cared enough to switch the status of someone’s Snapchat from “Delivered” to “Opened.”
9. Person who uses the Status Updates
I don’t know what this is and I don’t want to. Statuses are fine for Facebook because I can easily read/scan a Facebook status in ten seconds. However, I can pretty much guarantee that nobody is watching more than those same ten seconds of this person’s 180-second “Status Update,” which may or may not indicate anything of relevance about their life anyway. Who created this feature?
10. Person who you don’t Snapchat but will forever remain on your contacts list
The majority of your Snapchat contacts fall into this category. For some reason, you add people to your contact list to whom you are positive you will never send a Snapchat. This is different than leaving a random person as your friend on Facebook or something because Facebook is multifaceted: on occasion that random person could post an interesting quote or news article, or you could Like some cool accomplishment they had. Snapchat, on the other hand, has one purpose, and adding people to your Snapchat contacts list with whom you will never utilize that purpose is so incredibly pointless. But you do it anyway.
11. Person with whom you Snapchat flirt
This is the person for whom you don’t want to seem too weird in your Snapchats, but weird enough that they still find you cute and relatable. You want to make sure that this person doesn’t actually think you’re ugly, so you won’t cross your eyes or double your chin to their full potential. Snapchatting with this person can be a struggle: You don’t want to fall into the boring category #6, but you also don’t want to Snapchat something too bizarre that might freak this person out. Be careful to not let this person fall into category #1, though, for nobody can sustain an “Even my ugly faces aren’t ugly!” façade forever. Everyone has ugly faces sometimes, and everyone must eventually reveal them in real life.
12. Person with whom you actually were sexual
Wasn’t this the original purpose of Snapchat? To “safely” send nudes that, after an allotted time period, disintegrated into the cellular network and would be gone forever? Well, this person is the person with whom you fulfilled that original purpose of Snapchat. What started out as a decent alternative to reputation-ruining sexting turned into a rather entertaining game of trust: You trusted this person not to screenshot your breasts (now, you’d get a notification anyway) and they trusted you to leave the second limit on longer than 5 seconds – which you obviously didn’t do because frustrating your boyfriend was too much fun. “This is the worst invention ever! Send another!” they’d holler via subsequent text message, but you’d turned out the lights and put your retainer in already. Until next Snap. 
