Yik Yak

Yik Yak

Yik Yak website www.yikyak.com Type Anonymous social media Launch Date November, 2013 Status Active Product Line Yik Yak Platform iOS application Android Website www.yikyak.com

Yik Yak is a location-based social media application that was developed by Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington. Yik Yak acts like a local bulletin board for your area by showing the most recent posts from other users around you. They created this application with the goal, "to create a way for people to instantly connect with everyone around them. As of now, Yik Yak is now located in over 2000 campuses across the United States".

Yik Yak works off anonymous submissions from people within a 5-mile proximity. The main page consists of a refreshable feed of posts users have made. Yik Yak prefers to call their posts "yaks". As a user, you are allowed to upvote, downvote, and comment on these yaks. If your yak gets enough upvotes, it will be put under the "Hot" tab, which is where the most popular yaks are put. On the other hand, if your yak gets 5 more downvotes compared to upvotes, your yak will be removed from the public feed. The user will build up yakarma as they do more of these actions.

History

Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington first came up the idea for this app when they attended Furman University. They first meet each other in a programming class and their friendship only built up from there. Droll and Buffington were intrigued by anonymous Twitter accounts that were catered specifically to the Furman campus, and they wanted to recreate this experience in a phone application. However, it was not until they graduated when they wanted to take their idea more seriously. During January of 2014, Yik Yak started picking up more steam Atlanta Capital, which was an investment firm, decided to invest $20,000 into Yik Yak. During April of 2014, Yik Yak closed a $1.5 million and later a $10 million dollar investment deal with Vaizra Investments, with participation from DCM, Azure Capital Partners and other angels. Yik Yak has had tremendous success, but its growth in popularity and support has been flatlining recently.

Similar Applications

Whisper

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Nearby

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Secret

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Features

Photo Sharing

During July 15, 2015 Yik Yak started allowing users to post photos. However, Yik Yak moderates the photos before they are actually posted. Their guidelines are that you should not post inappropriate photos (anything you wouldn’t send to your mother), illegal content, or faces will be allowed in local feeds". Before they actually released this feature, they gave a few communities the ability to share photos earlier in order to provide feedback and ideas that they could use.

Peek

During October, 2014 Yik Yak released the feature that allowed users to view other Yik Yak community feeds. Particularly, you would be allowed to see into other US and international college's yak feeds. Giving the users the ability to search what area they want to see yaks from allows users to get an unfiltered look at what is happening in a certain area at any given time. Brooks Buffington, the COO and co-founder of Yik Yak said, “We’re building Yik Yak into a technology that fulfills a higher purpose of delivering organic and unfiltered truths, which cannot be said for other news mediums”.

Herd/Basecamp

On May 15, 2015 Yik Yak released the ability for users to set a basecamp for their yak feed. With this users would be able to set their yak feed to a certain location even though they are not actually in that area. Once you set up your herd, you will have the capability to switch between posting in your local feed or your "My Herd" feed.". Many users have wanted a way to still wanted to be a part of their campus herd, even though they were studying abroad or away for the summer. Also, this new update allows users to now see trending locations, local and global herds allowed for more exploration within the community.

Ethical Implications

Bullying & Cyberbullying

Although Droll and Buffington initially intended the application to be used only on college campuses, due to the ballooning popularity of Yik Yak, high school students also started using the application. There have been many instances where students felt like they were personally bullied by other anonymous users. This occurred when a 17-year-old by the name of Elizabeth Long tried to kill herself and other students started using the app against her, commenting things like, "Elizabeth Long needs to stop b******g about how she almost killed herself and go ahead and do it". After unsuccessful attempts to shut out the application within her school by talking to her school officials, she started a petition to have the app regulated more carefully or to be completely banned from the app store. As of now there are over 80,000 signatures on this petition, and Elizabeth has made a compromise with the creators of Yik Yak ". Responding to this, Yik Yak has started setting up Geofences around certain schools, raising the age in the Apple Store and Google Play from 12 to be 17 years old to allow parents to block underage users from the app, specifically prohibiting bullying in the terms of use, using natural language filters to prevent the names of any individuals from being posted as well as any racially insensitive or insulting terms, and adding moderators to review feeds and remove any offensive content that is flagged by users.

Threats

Due to the anonymous nature of Yik Yak, users have the ability to post almost anything unmoderated. There have been scenarios where users have abused this capability by posting threats onto the application.