More than any other social network, Snapchat is an app that encourages users to use the app as much as possible, thanks to features like streaks and the mysterious Snap score, which calculates your usage of the app to give you a numerical rating.
This gamification of an app is something we haven’t seen most other social media applications use – Facebook, for example, doesn’t calculate how many likes you’ve given to statuses to give you a score, and neither does Instagram, Snapchat’s closest competitor. While streaks are fairly easy to figure out (and to opt out of, simply by not snapping the person you have a streak with for 24 hours to cancel the streak altogether), there’s a lot more mystery surrounding Snapchat’s scoring method within the app.
Snap Inc. keeps their methods for calculating your Snapchat score under lock and key, though plenty of Snap sleuths have managed to learn the methods behind their scoring system simply by paying attention to the score when it rises.
Basically, the more you use the app, the higher your score will increase throughout each day, increasing when you send a snap to someone or when you open a snap that someone sent to you. Plenty of people love this method about Snapchat, since it effectively gamifies their app system and makes it more likely that you’ll use the app more often.
But for some, especially those who aren’t looking to flaunt their Snapchat success, you might not enjoy the competition and the need to raise your score everyday. For some, this feature might stress them out, especially when it comes to younger users still in high school. With the competition set among friends, it could create a stressful situation, with some looking to increase their number as fast as possible, and others looking to hide the number. Let’s take a look at what the Snapchat score represents, whether it’s worth worrying about, and if you can disable or hide the number in the settings of the app.
How Do I Find My Snapchat Score?
Start by opening Snapchat on your iPhone or Android device, where the app will load into the camera viewfinder. Tap on the profile icon in the upper-right hand corner of your display. If you’ve created and synced a Bitmoji with your Snapchat account, this profile icon will be your Bitmoji’s face; otherwise, you’ll see a Snapchat silhouette as your profile image. Once you tap on this icon, Snapchat will reveal your profile page, with the option to add friends, your Snapcode, and any Stories you’ve posted on your account. In addition to your username and your Zodiac sign that displays your birth date range, you’ll find a corresponding number that links your account to your point collection. Depending on how new you are to Snapchat, this number could be as low as a couple hundred points, or high enough to reach hundreds of thousands of points.
This number is your Snapchat score, displaying the full number of points you’ve made over a certain amount of time. Tapping on the score will allow you to see both your sent score and your received score within Snapchat, with the sent score on the left and the received score on the right.
What Does the Score Mean?
Unfortunately, Snapchat has never fully explained how their points system works, so it can often be difficult to keep up with exactly how these points are score. Still, just by conducting a few tests and following some basic math, we can view a simple breakdown of these points based on what we do now.
- Sending or receiving a snap awards you with a single point, though some snaps do seem to aware additional points for unknown reasons.
- Sending snaps to multiple people at once doesn’t award you with additional points – just because you send the same snap to thirty, sixty, or one hundred people from your Snapchat friends list doesn’t net you additional points.
- Posting a snap to your story gains you a point, but viewing stories does not.
- Likewise, posting video stories with multiple videos (reaching over the ten second mark) doesn’t seem to gain you any additional points.
- Forming or continuing a streak doesn’t gain you additional points. And just as you can’t continue a streak by sending a chat message, sending chats doesn’t increase your Snap score either.
As mentioned above, these are just what we know definitively nets you those coveted points. That said, there are some weird outliers where points increase in large amounts without any kind of explanation for why the points increase in the first place. Still, we can use the guidelines above easily to determine exactly how to score some bonus points. Let’s take a look at how to game the points system in Snapchat, for those readers looking to raise their Snap score as fast as possible.
How Do I See Other People’s Snapchat Scores?
If they’re your friend, it’s simple. Open the app, slide to the left to open the Chat interface, then select the friend you want to view from the list. Tap on their bitmoji or the silhouette (for those who don’t have Bitmojis) to open up their profile screen. This allows you to see their username, their location on Snapmap, the ability to snap, chat, call, or video chat with the person, and to open up the settings menu for that particular contact. At the top of this page, next to the username of your selected friend, you can view their Snap score in all its glory, making it easy to compare it to your own score along the way.
If you aren’t friends with the person whose score you’re trying to see, you won’t be able to see their score. It isn’t until you and that person have both mutually added each other that you can compare your Snapchat scores together, so keep that in mind before you choose to try to compare it to someone in your class who doesn’t follow you.
How Can I Hide My Snapchat Score?
The difficult truth of the matter is, unfortunately, there’s no real way to disable and hide your Snapchat score from your friends within the app. If they want to see what your score is on Snapchat, they’re basically going to be able to, unless they aren’t friends with you. The good news is, as we described above, there’s no way for them to see your score unless you both add each other. This makes it easy to weed out people who you don’t want seeing your profile information by, basically, removing them from your app altogether. Unfortunately, if you need to keep someone on Snapchat as your friend, they’re going to be able to see your Snapchat score, whether you want them to or not. There’s a small hope that, sometime in the future, Snapchat will eventually add a setting to the app that allows you to hide your score from your friends in the privacy settings of the application, but as of right now, that’s not an option.
Still we can use the privacy settings in the app to make sure that only a certain number of people can even add your profile in general. If you’re worried about people adding you to see your Snapchat score, as low or high as it may be, you can use the privacy settings in the app to your advantage. To start, open the app and tap on your Bitmoji in the upper-left hand corner. Tap on the settings gear on this page to open your settings menu, and scroll down to the section labeled “Who can…” This effectively functions as your privacy settings in Snapchat, and it’s worth taking a look at if you haven’t done so in a while. You’ll want to make sure that you have everything here set as either “My Friends” or “Only Me,” depending on how you feel about the location settings in Snapchat.
You should also take a look at the “See Me in Quick Add” setting here, which is able to be turned on and off. Quick Add shows you suggestions of people based on mutual friends and connections, but if you want to help hide your profile from people who might be trying to find your Snapchat score, you can turn this off in the settings menu in order to completely shut off this feature altogether. With this off, you can stop worrying about someone adding you automatically to see your Snapchat score, as they’ll need to add you through a Snapcode or username to do so.
