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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Meet Hunter Prosper, a Bloomfield resident who has amassed 6.3 million followers on TikTok by capturing and posting videos that highlight the personal experiences of people throughout Western Pennsylvania and beyond.
Prosper interviews strangers about their lives and shares their stories with his massive TikTok audience.
A TikTok star with 6.3 million followers might have trouble staying incognito in most cities. Luckily for Hunter Prosper, he lives in Pittsburgh.
“I believe Pittsburgh is such a hard-hat, lunch-pail town that they truly don’t care,” said Prosper, 28, of Bloomfield. “I could have 15 million followers and they wouldn’t care if I was walking down the street. There’s beauty in that.”
Prosper amassed a gigantic TikTok following over the last three years by capturing and posting videos highlighting the personal experiences of folks throughout Western Pennsylvania and beyond. These days, he mostly focuses on three self-explanatory and aptly named series: “Stories from a Stranger,” “Notes from a Stranger” and “Notes to a Stranger.”
His videos regularly break a million views. Prosper’s most-watched piece of content involves an older gentleman reminiscing about his first love that has racked up more than 52.6 million views since it first hit TikTok on Jan. 14, 2022.
The Emporium native is a traveling nurse who typically spends three or four months out of his year in Pittsburgh. He conducted his Post-Gazette interview from California, which is just one stop on his latest national story-collecting tour for a book he’s putting together.
good listener
Prosper studied nursing at Indiana University of Pennsylvania before relocating to Pittsburgh, which allowed him to further his medical career in a way that would’ve been more difficult had he opted to stay in Cameron County.
“There’s always something to do, endeavors to get involved in and ways to find things you didn’t know you liked,” he said of life in the Steel City. “You’re more limited in a small town, but at the end of the day, life is what you make it. ... It’s really about perspective.”
Prosper had been a floor nurse for about five years before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and he moved to the intensive care unit. Burnout quickly began to set in, especially after he realized that fewer and fewer patients were leaving the ICU during the pandemic’s deadliest days.
During that time, a patient close to his age passed away from something unrelated to COVID. Before she died, Prosper had watched her well up with happiness simply by asking, “Who was your greatest love and why did you fall in love with them?”
On Jan. 29, 2021, Prosper posted a short video to TikTok discussing their conversation that immediately earned him a small following. He continued to create content centered around lessons he learned from his patients, whose true identities he concealed due to HIPAA rules that protect patient privacy.
As a floor nurse, Prosper always enjoyed making patients “feel comfortable in an uncomfortable setting.” With the encouragement of his girlfriend, he began interviewing strangers in Bloomfield and “was met with beautiful responses” on the videos he posted containing their advice, wisdom and stories.
“That’s when I noticed a community was being built,” Prosper said. “What was ever more beautiful was my burnout was healing. ... I re-found that love for listening to people.”
TikTok was the ideal platform for Prosper’s content since it already boasted an “emboldened and galvanized audience” with an insatiable appetite for vertically shot videos. He has been able to monetize his popularity via TikTok’s Creativity Program Beta, which the company’s website says was designed to provide its most successful users with “the potential to collect rewards as you create and publish longer video content.”
“Creators like Hunter are transforming storytelling and bringing people together from around the world,” Ben Thomas, TikTok’s global monetization lead, said in an emailed statement. “We're committed to supporting our creators with the platform and tools to pursue their passions, find their community to build deeper connections and unlock real-world opportunities.”
Prosper will sometimes walk around a park or entire city for seven or eight hours straight to find willing “Stories from a Stranger” subjects. He can generally tell at this point when someone may be interested in talking to him and when to let them be. Even on the days when he talks to only a few people, he has been known to make those interactions count with interviews that sometimes last up to three hours.
While Prosper only occasionally brightens strangers’ days with his own notes, “Notes from a Stranger” has become a staple of his TikTok account. He launched that series after hearing a “gorgeous story” from someone who wanted to remain anonymous. He will now regularly set up a table in a public space, gather responses to a specific prompt and read one on camera.
Maybe Prosper doesn’t get noticed a whole lot in Western Pennsylvania because he rarely appears in “Stories from a Stranger” videos and usually makes short cameos in “Notes from a Stranger” posts.
That’s probably just fine by a guy whose main goal is to prove that “we’re more alike than we are different” and that there are certain emotional frequencies we can all recognize regardless of our individual situations.
“When I talk to these strangers, it’s not a fleeting thing where I’m looking for a viral clip,” Prosper said. “I genuinely want to hear people’s stories.”
Joshua Axelrod: jaxelrod@post-gazette.com and X @jaxelburgh.
First Published March 6, 2024, 5:30am
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