By Harper Skrzypczak, Editor-in-Chief.
If you enter a rundown public restroom you’re likely to find a variety of things scribbled on the stall walls: profanity,propositions for sex, crude penis jokes,drug references, breakup stories and maybe a joke or two. If you download the app Yik Yak you’ll find the same lowbrow rantings.
Yik Yak, created in 2013, is asocial media app that lets users send anonymous posts. The app shares those posts with other users in a 1.5 mile radius. Users in your radius can view,comment on and upvote or downvote your post.
Other features of Yik Yak include: Yakarma, a numerical score that determines the “success” of a user by calculating their upvotes, downvotes and comments; Peek, which lets users look at, but not vote on, Yik Yak feeds that are not in their radius; a Hot tab,which shows the most popular posts of the past hour; My Herd, which lets users set a single geographic location as a base camp and allows them to post to their “herd” even while away; and a Photos feature,which lets users post photos as long as it doesn’t include inappropriate/illegal content or faces.
The first time I downloaded Yik Yak was over a year ago. The most disappointing aspect of the app was how few users there are in my local area. Clearly, the app hasn’t quite caught on around here. Although the posts were mildly entertaining to read I got tired of the drug deals, hookup requests and anonymous shit talking after a day or two. With so few users in the area, I was stuck looking at the same posts because new content wasn’t happening fast enough – so I deleted it.
In October I went to a media conference in Austin, Texas and because the event was sponsored by Yik Yak I decided to give it another try. Yik Yak in Austin was vastly different. Because of the denser population and array of colleges in the area there was always new posts to view. It included all the typical bathroom stall rantings, but it also had a better sense of community.Users alerted others of traffic incidents, cancelled classes and open basketball courts where they could get a quick game in.
After my trip I gave my local “herd”another try, but the content and amount of users hasn’t changed too much. The only significant thing I’ve noticed in the last year is an increase in threats, empty or not, on Yik Yak. The app seems to be in the news a lot lately for violent threats,racists remarks, etc. Maybe users don’t understand that their geolocation, which they provide to Yik Yak, is traceable or they are so completely unaware of our police state that they think impromptu threats will go unnoticed.
For now, I’m deleting Yik Yak – it doesn’t provide me with anything I haven’t already seen before.
