UC Berkeley students developed a website that ranked about 42,000 Berkeley residents based on their activity on the food ordering platform Snackpass. The site displayed the top Snackpass users and their top food spots until its owners took it down Tuesday.
The Snackpass Wrapped site, hosted on areyouafatchud.com and created by UC Berkeley students Ayush Paul and Oleg Viatkin, utilized public gift transaction data from the Snackpass app for its rankings, according to Paul. Paul worked closely with Viatkin, founder of money-management platform Flip, who designed the site’s user interface with data Paul collected.
Paul said in an interview that he and Viatkin launched the site in August. On Tuesday, they took it down.
“We saw this as an experiment in how many interesting things could be created from data around a consumer product, and we pushed that experiment pretty far,” Paul said in a text message after the site went down. “Unsurprisingly, Snackpass wasn’t thrilled with the result. We’ve taken the site down temporarily while we sort things out, and I’m hopeful we can find an approved path to bring it back.”
Snackpass did not reply to repeated requests for comment on the site and its takedown.
Paul said he created the website, which references Spotify’s year-in-review Wrapped feature, after realizing the narrative potential of Snackpass’ publicly accessible data.
“We realized there’s so many small patterns we can pick up on,” Paul said. “Like if you send gifts to one friend over and over again and then you suddenly stop, there’s probably something deeper going on here.”
The rankings were visualized on a leaderboard, and users were able to view the top 100 Snackpass profiles and their stats as well as search for other users’ profiles.
In an interview, Viatkin said the name of the site is meant to “be a little more polarizing and show people that they might be spending a lot on something they thought they weren’t spending a lot on.”
Every time a user makes a purchase through Snackpass, they can gift points to their Snackpass friends to use at the same restaurant from which they bought. Profiles were ranked based on the number of gifts that users had sent and received in the past year. Users on the site also received awards based on their stats and food preferences.
Harley Ao, a UC Berkeley alumnus who ranked first on the leaderboard, received the title “D1 Ball Eater.”
“It was pretty surprising,” Ao said. “Other than that, I thought it was a little funny to see my friends on there too.”
“Being #1 in terms of both sending and receiving snackpass gifts really made me appreciate how close of a community I had last year,” Ao added in a later text message.
According to Paul, award titles were based on “whatever niche references you can make.”
UC Berkeley student Cy Luu, who held the No. 7 ranking on the leaderboard, said he has received a total of 461 gifts on Snackpass.
Luu said he saw the site as something he could laugh at, but was surprised when he first saw his name on the leaderboard.
“I’m not gonna lie — it’s a little embarrassing, but it’s funny. I feel like I can laugh at myself about it, which makes me feel better,” Luu said. “I was a little shocked to see that I had been contributing to a hidden statistic my entire time here.”
Viatkin and Paul said they are working to bring the site back.
As of press time, the site displays a message reading “Are you a fat chud? Maybe. Likely, in fact. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait to find out. We’re temporarily paused while we sort a few things out.”
The message is signed, “Yours truly, Ayush & Flip.”