What is Yik Yak? This app, available on both Apple and Droid products, is essentially anonymous Twitter. With no required profiles to identify individuals, Yik Yak has become a hot spot for both nastiness and hilarity. Yik Yak picks up your local area and broadcasts yaks (messages) bulletin-board style to everyone in your vicinity, up to a certain number of people. Users are given the option to up-vote or down-vote yaks to assign the yak’s important on the app. The best yaks wind up on the All-Time Greatest Yaks board. At the top of the list is one from Auburn, and it is the origin of all of the Sarah jokes and commentary.
With the new update there is also the option to peek at popular universities, including Hogwarts, so that you can always keep up with the happenings at your favorite school. Or you can look at your least favorite and re-affirm why we all dislike the University of Alabama. Yik Yak also offers users the ability to assign themselves handles such as “Campus Squirrels” and “Ukulele Boy” to add an extra dimension to their yak. Many users have also been asking about Yakarma, which is another new addition. Yakarma is essentially a running tally of your up votes and down votes, as well as the up-votes and down-votes you assign others.
As funny as Yik Yak is, it is not for the faint of heart. Yik Yak is extremely offensive. Every racist, awful, and chauvinistic thought that any person has (not all of it is satire, sadly) is often posted and can scare off anyone with thin skin.
All unpleasantness aside, Yik Yak can be highly enjoyable. It is like being a fly on the wall – you can know almost everything that’s going on everywhere in town. For instance, students in the Auburn area take special care to warn each other about where cops are camping out, as well as where the significant traffic jams are. Want to know which bar is fun on a Monday night? Someone will be yakking about it. For those of us who were studying instead of partying at Rodeo, Yik Yak also enables us to live vicariously through everyone else’s poor decisions and hijinks. It’s like Jersey Shore, but in Auburn.