Yik Yak is the new anonymous social media app that is picking up steam across college campuses, including UWM.
Founded by Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington in 2013, Yik Yak uses GPS location to give users an anonymous, Twitter-style newsfeed from the user’s immediate area, about a 1.5 mile radius.
The app has grown from being used in just a few, mostly southern universities last year to hundreds of universities, technical colleges and community colleges all over the nation, even starting to extend internationally.
The content of the newsfeed usually includes jokes and comments about drinking, sex, and various aspects of campus life.
The anonymity of the app gives users an outlet to say things that they usually wouldn’t say on sites such as Twitter or Facebook.
Most of the fun comes from the outlandish and sometimes crude jokes that are said on the feed. “It’s funny, it’s something to read and pass time with,” said Ian Zelko, a junior at UWM.
While most of the “yaks” are on the cruel side of fun and innocent, it has been reported that some users use the anonymity of the app to attack people, races and genders.
The app has already been banned by a number of universities, high schools and grade schools. One of the more public cases took place at Norwich University in Vermont, due of concerns over cyber bullying including racist, homophobic and sexist content. Tatum High School in New Mexico even went as far as to ban cell phone use all together because of use of the app.
Yik Yak has taken steps to combat this by blocking the app in high school and grade school areas. In an interview with PCWorld.com, CEO Tyler Droll said of high school and middle school students, “they’re not psychologically ready to handle something with this much power.”
The app has a list of rules that include prohibiting the bullying of other ‘yakkers,’ and a zero tolerance policy on posting phone numbers and blatantly offensive yaks.
The app mainly relies on other users to police what is offensive by “down-voting” and reporting yaks. Users can be suspended if they are repeatedly reported.
They also use moderators to watch for offensive content. In the same interview with Pcworld Droll said “We have moderators who review flagged posts. But we err on the side of, pretty much when something is flagged, it’s almost always taken off.”
Because you don’t sign up for an account and give personal information to the company like you do with most other social media, it’s hard to generate advertising dollars for the company. With advertising being the main source of funding most social media companies us to make money, Yik Yak may have to find a different way to generate profits. Despite this, the company has raised over $10 million from Vaizra Investments, DCM and Azure Capital Partners among others.
Campus rep Tim Keenan views the app’s future as more than just jokes. He see it as a potential way of generating school spirit and a channel for making announcements to large numbers of people since you don’t need to have followers to have your posts seen.
One thing is for certain, even with its issues, Yik Yak is an entertaining app that only seems to be getting more and more popular by the day.