This week’s campus celebrities are the moderators of the infamous ND Crushes twitter account. Getting their start a little over a year ago, and recently being rumored to step down, HCND decided it was time to conduct an anonymous online interview with the super secret friend duo that receive, review, and publish all those ND crushes.
HCND: What made you want to start the twitter and when did you start it?
Moderator 1: NDC was started by one of us originally, after stumbling upon a similar account at a different school, and realizing that ND didn’t have one yet. I decided to make an account before anyone else had the chance. Since it became popular relatively quickly, I realized a second person was needed to help run the account (and because I would enjoy running it with a friend). It became a shared account within the first couple months of it being created in March 2013
HCND: How much of your time is spent reading through and posting crushes?
It doesn’t take that much time to post a crush- so whenever we’re walking to and from class or doing homework we can copy and paste the crushes. The only times that crushes accumulate in our ask* is when we go out on weekends, when we’re studying (most crushes are submitted at night) or when we’re both in class, in which case it does take a little time to post all the crushes.
HCND: What is unique about ND’s crushes that represents our culture, and distinguishes us from other schools?
Although NDC does have the normal, shallow, and often physical crushes like other schools, there is a special aspect to NDC. A lot of the crushes are genuine and are about people performing acts of kindness or being overall great people, for example “To the guy that held the door for me outside LaFun while I was struggling with my books, dinner sometime?” or “To anyone who ran the Holy Half, you are beautiful.” There are an incredible amount of tweets that are positive and spiritual as well. There are even crushes involving religion, such as, “Girl in the basilica today, you are astonishing”. It really shows how caring the community is and how respectful people are of one another. Few pages have the positive, simple, and religious messages that make up ND’s core values.
HCND: How many of the crushes that you receive actually get posted?
It depends on the day. We try to filter as many vulgar crushes as possible, and let us say; there are an overwhelming number we have to delete. The more crushes submitted, the harder it is to post every crush. We don’t always have time to look through all of the crushes (we apologize to anyone whose crush has been overlooked).
HCND: What makes a crush un-postable?
We try to steer clear of posting crushes that are highly inappropriate or vulgar since it’s clear the majority of our followers wouldn’t appreciate reading those tweets. We have learned the hard way that a lot of backlash can be received if we submit extremely offensive crushes. We never intentionally post something to hurt someone, and since we can’t understand the context of the crush, if it is offensive and someone asks for it to be removed we always respect his or her wishes. It’s hard when we receive an overwhelming number of crushes in a short period of time, so reading them thoroughly can be difficult, and in turn we may accidentally post a few here and there that should not be posted. Crushes poking fun of race or homosexuality are normally deleted from our ask.fm and don’t make it to twitter.
HCND: Why are you giving up the crush twitter now? Graduation?
Hahaha it was an April Fool’s joke actually. We also hoped that it would give us a fresh start since a few too many people knew our real identities (even though we’ve only told a few people, word gets around). It was quite amusing to see how many people were interested in taking over the account. But the original moderators are continuing to run NDC.
HCND: Have you enjoyed moderating the page, why?
Moderator 1: It is so fun moderating the page! It’s quite entertaining to read all the crushes that are submitted.
Moderator 2: Of course! Although we are simply the messengers of a crush, it is highly entertaining to read every single crush submitted. And even though we don’t misuse our power, it’s nice to know we have that sort of leverage if we ever need it.
HCND: What are some of the strangest crushes you’ve read?
Some people crush about weird fetishes, others give out their phone numbers. The weirdest ones we have read are the ones that we unfortunately cannot post.
HCND: What are your favorite crushes?
Moderator 1: My personal favorite was one about myself. A person I’m dating now (and liked at the time) crushed about me while we were both at the grotto praying. It’s a personal one, and I will never forget it!
Moderator 2: Sometimes we will sit in a place like LaFun and crush about random people sitting next to each other or people in a study group and it’s funny because then they think the other person wrote it about them. Hey, maybe we’re also matchmakers.
HCND: Have you ever posted any of your own crushes?
Yes. If you’re asking if we submit crushes that we write, of course! And if we get crushed anonymously, we’ll post it, but if it’s clearly written by one of our friends we may or may not post the crush.
*ask.fm- the website and app that allows people to anonymously submit crushes, the link for the ND Crush ask is under its icon picture on twitter
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