If you’re in college, you know Yik Yak. Unfortunately.
But for the people who are lucky enough not to know, Yik Yak is a pseudonymous social media platform that is tailored towards college campuses. Students can register with their school email and see posts from their peers and within their own community. The app is designed to keep you anonymous and gives users non-specific usernames or numbers as identifiers in their posts. It is a way to stay updated with the people on your campus and offers a sense of comfort knowing that people are doing the same posting and scrolling that you are.
But in reality, how does this app impact a college community?
When you first open Yik Yak, it functions similarly to X, formerly known as Twitter. The app showcases a stream full of live posts, with no names or profile photos. For the University of Connecticut, the username and profile picture is simply just “UConn,” and posts stream in on a daily basis. There’s the ability to join group chats and communities, and a dashboard which tracks your posts, comments, and a point system for your amount of “Yakarma.” It acts as a system that measures your popularity and engagement through “upvoting” and “downvoting,” better known as thumbs up and thumbs down, which either enhances or hurts your score. The inspiration was taken from Reddit, and the more points you have, the more active in the app you are. Posts with a large amount of upvotes are often pushed up in the feed, with the idea that if more of the “herd” agrees with the post, then it should be at the top so way more people interact with it. On the other side of it, if a post gets five downvotes, it is removed because of the unanimous disagreement.
People post on Yik Yak on a daily basis. At least at UConn, people post almost 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and the categories vary. There are posts about virtually everything, and there is a sense of community that is built on the platform. People ask questions about certain professors, give advice on how to study, make relatable jokes about 8 a.m. classes, and more. During basketball season, the feed is flooded with updates about the game and people’s thoughts on how we played, which overall boosts the school spirit in terms of excitement. Then there’s the characters, such as people calling out loud groups in the library or the unanimous love for an enthusiastic worker at one of our on-campus cafe’s, better known as “the Beanery guy.” It serves as an open, public space that is free of judgment and is accessible to every single person in the campus community. With as large of a school as UConn, it is difficult for many people from different corners of the school to connect and agree. Being a faceless poster allows for more freedom and gives you the ability to express yourself on a larger social scale.
But, with all social media, there is a major downside.
Yik Yak’s accessibility to a vast student body became the center of online issues. Cyberbullying, hate speech, and rumors are spread with ease. Yik Yak has been aware of this controversy, where, in recent years, they have made major strides in building a safe online community. The app was originally launched in November of 2013, yet due to these very issues, it shut down in 2017, was later revived in 2021, and eventually was bought out by a company called Sidechat in 2023.
Sidechat instantly enabled features that would limit people from feeling confident under an alias. They also installed location features and set rules in place that would verify that users were actually in the college community when posting about it. But their controversies still plagued them.
Universities around the nation still feel indifferent about the app, as people believe that the ability to produce hate speech aligns with the constitutional right of free speech. Institutions such as Santa Clara University, as well as Colgate University, had protests and speeches in regard to Yik Yak’s purpose, with one writer for a newspaper comparing the app’s purpose to “a bathroom stall without a door.”
Overall, Yik Yak is an app that will remain as a question of whether it should be used or not. The space is an online forum that gives people the chance to connect with those around them, especially as we evolve into a less and less friendly society as a whole. But social media remains a dangerous place, with reports of Yik Yak even driving people into self-harming behaviors, including suicide.
College is a sensitive time in many people’s lives, yet this simple app can permanently alter campus communities. Now the question lies with you, do you like Yik Yak?