High school students across America are nervously awaiting their college acceptance letters at present. However, one university is taking an unorthodox approach to the process.
The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (UWGB) is trying to reach students on an app young people know and love: Snapchat. It also makes the nerve-racking wait that bit shorter. After all, a snap arrives quicker than a letter.
“Students love Snapchat. The age group that we’re looking to really connect with, they’re on Snapchat all of the time,” Jena Richter Landers, UWGB social media specialist, told WBAY.
Aside from the immediacy, it also makes for a more interactive process, claims Landers. Students often reply with excited selfies of themselves after viewing the acceptance snap.
That’s not to say UWGB has ditched the traditional postal route. Students still receive admission packets in the mail, along with an email. But if they’re on Snapchat, chances are the app will be the first place they’ll find out the news.
Katie Vlachina, a UWGB student who helps the university send out its snaps, said: “They get really excited about that and it’s really cool.”
The university itself will know when someone views a snap, and if they’ve replayed or taken a screenshot.
With over 150 million daily active users, Snapchat is an app that has its loyal fanbase well and truly hooked. Millennials (those currently aged 16-35) make up its largest demographic, totaling 70 percent of its entire user base, according to data published by eMarkerter. Additionally, Snapchat claims that on average its users spend 25-30 minutes a day on its platform.
It’s safe to say that young people can’t get enough of Snapchat and, if more colleges end up adopting UWGB’s strategy, students will likely end up glued to the app for even longer in anticipation of that acceptance message.
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?