The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/style/yik-yak-bullying-mary-washington.html

by daschaefer • 9 years ago

100 126 9 years ago

tyingq2• 9 years ago

Surprised it hasn't been replaced by someone outside the US who wouldn't be pressured to make it a safe space. Not discounting the potential issues...just surprised it hasn't happened.

theparanoid• 9 years ago

Probably, there just isn't the demand. Snapchat snapped up most of the market (not anonymous but similar)

tyingq2• 9 years ago

The decline in interest happened after they got rid of anonymity.

StevePerkins• 9 years ago

I'm an alumni of Usenet and IRC from back in the early-90's. I can assure you that there's always been (and probably always will be) demand for anonymous forums, into which trolls can project sexual frustration and feelings of powerlessness.

I was a bit too old to know about Yik Yak during its heyday, but I can only imagine the troll-appeal of anonymity PLUS being able to target local real-world individuals by name. Old school trolling was limited to targets who were non-local, and by and large anonymous themselves.

So I have no doubt about the market demand from trolls. I just don't understand why there was ever any demand from ANYONE ELSE. And I certainly don't see a path to monetization.

skywhopper• 9 years ago

The question is, could anyone else raise enough money to get something like this started again after what Yik Yak became? VC funds likely won't want to touch something like Yik Yak for a while. At the very least a platform that so visibly enables anonymous coordination of harassment is unlikely to attract the advertisers or sponsors they would need to become profitable.

daveguy• 9 years ago

Is it possible to make an open source peer to peer version? Seems like something along the lines of ipfs or dat would be a good substrate.

Is it open source feasible in walled gardens like apple or google app stores? With respect to dev costs, permissions, tooling?

xor1• 9 years ago

Not surprising, no one has figured out how to monetize it properly.

oevi• 9 years ago

There is Jodel [0] which is quite popular among students in Germany. It has strict guidelines [1] which try exactly this.

[0] https://jodel-app.com/

[1] https://jodel-app.com/guidelines.html

sorenjan• 9 years ago

It's popular in Sweden as well.

afabisch• 9 years ago

There is Jodel: https://jodel-app.com/

DonHopkins3• 9 years ago

You're right, there has been a disturbing trend in the US of creating safe spaces for racists [1], like in the White House [2] [3], college campuses [4], fraternities [5], Trump rallies [6], and even Broadway [7], to enumerate a few examples.

But don't be surprised, because it's already happened: Germany's Jodel network is much more successful than Yik Yak, with its strict guidelines [8] against racism, discrimination and hate speech, so it isn't a safe space for racists, like Yik Yak was and the White House still is [9].

[1] Trump’s election has created “safe spaces” for racists: Southern Poverty Law Center’s Heidi Beirich on the wave of hate crimes: http://www.salon.com/2017/03/08/trumps-election-has-created-...

[2] Sean Spicer turns the White House into a safe space for conservative media: https://newrepublic.com/minutes/140896/sean-spicer-turns-whi...

[3] I'm tweeting from under my desk because President Obama wiretapped me: http://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/capitol-ink-white-house...

[4] On Campus, Trump Fans Say They Need ‘Safe Spaces’: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/us/politics/political-div...

[5] The Trump Bros Have Found Their Safe Space: https://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/the-trump-bros-ha...

[6] Republicans who once mocked ‘safe spaces’ are feeling sensitive over protests : https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/after-a-campaign-sea...

[7] Trump demands safe space for Mike Pence after he was booed at Hamilton: http://www.avclub.com/article/trump-demands-safe-space-mike-...

[8] Jodel Community Guidelines: https://jodel-app.com/guidelines.html

[9] Mr. President, come out of your safe space: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/page/ct-trump-med...

mokash• 9 years ago

What ruined Yik Yak for me was making the geographical areas larger so my University's 'herd' included surrounding cities too. Too much noise. This compounded with the removal of anonymity led to me deleting the application.

Wonder if it is possible to run an app like this at cost somehow.

Alex39172• 9 years ago

Wonder if it is possible to run an app like this at cost somehow.

Given that it's just an API serving short text snippets, the hosting costs shouldn't be more than a few cents per user per year. Let's say you're serving one university with 50,000 students, and your hosting costs are $3,000 per year... Just send out an update email once a quarter with a few ads at the end and you've more than covered your expenses.

reilly30002• 9 years ago

In order to do a quarterly email that pays your the service you would have to achieve a minimum page CPM of $15 which at the industry average rate of $1.50 would need 10 ads sold and trafficked per email. Not impossible, but a lot of effort to source and manage that revenue and/or more frequent emails, larger rates (more sales effort) or ...?

simonw• 9 years ago

You also need to pay for staff to handle customer and legal complaints. That ain't cheap.

neolefty• 9 years ago

The article makes the case (to me) that local + anonymous was a failed experiment. In real-life communities, local means not anonymous, and bad behavior -- which is rare whether anonymous or not -- can be tied to an individual right away.

The problem is that nasty, anonymous, and local is a terrible combination:

That hyper-localization is also what made the cases of harassment particularly galling. Ms. Musick, one of the plaintiffs, said, “With Yik Yak, in the back of your mind, you know they’re not from around the world or other parts of the state, they’re right there in your classroom, in your dining hall. On a campus with 4,500 students, that’s a pretty small group of people. This isn’t some creepy guy in his mom’s basement in Indiana.”

In contrast, nasty, anonymous, and non-local is much easier to dismiss.

The plaintiffs tried to solve it other ways, but they couldn't. All the local authorities referred them back to Yik-Yak -- the university staff, local police -- and Yik-Yak usually did nothing and at best would hide posts.

To be clear, most of Yik-Yak was non-harassing. Useful? I don't know. Apparently not useful enough.

kuschku• 9 years ago

The article makes the case (to me) that local + anonymous was a failed experiment.

Jodel, a German YikYak clone, is still alive and well – in fact, doing better than ever.

Might be due to different environments, different moderation approaches, but it works.

csydas2• 9 years ago

I'm not sure this is entirely fair. YikYak's undoing was doing away with the features that brought people to it; it was a very popular application, and continued to be right up until the de-anonymizing aspects were brought into play. It's function a digital bathroom wall was pretty well executed and in most cases, seemingly a success for interaction. It wasn't really good for anything else besides shitposting, but it definitely was something that people wanted.

I was working at a University in the heyday of YikYak and yes, there were bad posts. Since it was tech related, our administration asked my department to keep an eye on it, but for our school (4500 some students), the attitude was more moderate than it was abusive. Threatening or harassing Yaks were almost always down-voted off the app before we'd even have a chance to see it.

Obviously, other institutions didn't have the same luck that we did, but from my point of view, there was a very good moderation system in place from YikYak - sure, anyone could post something anonymously that was malicious and hateful - but it was incredibly easy to clear it from YikYak.

The student body also took a huge interest in making sure that YikYak stayed in the spirit of anonymous; lot of articles in the student paper about it, lot of rants on the random Facebook Confess pages, and YikYak itself was filled with comments about keeping "stupid shit" off of it. Did some kids still post stupid stuff? Sure, but the rest were more inclined to help with the upkeep.

paulcole3• 9 years ago

It's function a digital bathroom wall was pretty well executed

But is that an idea worth executing?

$73 million dollars down the tubes on a "digital bathroom wall." I would say I'm amazed that anyone thought this was an idea worth investing in, but sadly, I'm really not amazed at all.

Forge36• 9 years ago

I wouldn't say we know it's useful or not. It went to profiles with handles and profile pictures. It lost its appeal when it did that. That's was when my community jumped ship to Jodel.

afarrell• 9 years ago

Zephyr, the first IP-based IM system, briefly experimented with anonymity. It was similarly local--mostly being on the MIT campus (links to CMU zephyr being rare). I've not seen a historical record of the messages posted, but I've been told by multiple grey-haired alums that things turned toxic very quickly.

xxSparkleSxx• 9 years ago

When I was in college a decade ago there were multiple sites like this. Juicy Campus was one of them, but I can't remember others.

You could find some really abhorrent things on there, but no one ever got into trouble. It's a shitty message board and some people get their feelings hurts. We're all adults though, people just moved on.

jancsika• 9 years ago

Seems like this would have worked better if the anonymity were weakened. For example, a range between "click this button to deanonymize" and "do roughly 30 minutes of work on a modern desktop to break the key that reveals who posted this" which is chosen by the poster.

There's still value in posting such weak anonymous messages, but the foreknowledge that it will eventually get broken would ward off the worst of the abuses.

rxhernandez• 9 years ago

“With Yik Yak, in the back of your mind, you know they’re not from around the world or other parts of the state, they’re right there in your classroom, in your dining hall. On a campus with 4,500 students, that’s a pretty small group of people. This isn’t some creepy guy in his mom’s basement in Indiana.”

I mean is this really true? I was interacting with UCI students when I spent nights working in the Google complex. That's at least a couple mile radius.

repomies6991• 9 years ago

In my area the young people all using Jodel, which is very similar. However it has some moderation etc features.

qmarchi• 9 years ago

Honestly, I don't get all the complaining from harassment.

We live in a digital age where we can control a large amount of our information stream. If we don't like something, we just turn off the stream. It's like left-wing advocates and Fox. They don't like it, so they don't watch it.

If you don't like what people are posting on some service, remove the service, inform people you know that you don't care about what's posted.

Go on living, stop being a hyper-sensitive prick about people saying mean things. They're going to say them whether or not it's on Yik-Yak, 4chan, or Facebook.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm missing something. Let me know. I love being wrong, it lets me learn new things.

nothis2• 9 years ago

The article is pretty specific. First of all, it talks about school kids who you can't really tell to "be rational about it". Secondly, if you turn off your phone but people still organize multimedia mass-harassment behind your back, "turning off your phone" doesn't change shit.

sikosmurf• 9 years ago

A third point is that "turn off your phone" is incredibly dismissive. A person shouldn't have to live without the Internet due to the actions of one, two, or twenty individuals.

mirimir3• 9 years ago

Sure. I'm sure that people are saying all sorts of bad things about Mirimir. And about my other personas. And about my meatspace identity. But I don't go out of my way to read that stuff. Any more than I go out of my way to read media that seems stupid.

However, I do get the concern about anonymous online mobs. If you're targeted heavily online, it's possible that someone will act out violently. Like that guy who shot up Comet Ping Pong over “Pizza Gate.”

People generally don't seem to handle online anonymity very well. But that's just how it is. Online anonymity is too important for many reasons to be killed over harassment. The key is to provide it anonymously, and make sure that it can't be taken down.

Edit: typo

throwaway9980• 9 years ago

Just last night I saw a message scrawled on a bathroom wall that said, "for a good time, call Mirimir."

Don't know if that's good or bad from your perspective, but I chuckled at the old school hyperlocal anonymity of it.

criley2• 9 years ago

"But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm missing something. Let me know. I love being wrong, it lets me learn new things"

So, I think the concept of society especially for teenagers in their school-controlled world is very interesting.

You're ostensibly right, "just turn it off", but I think it's more complicated.

So why would someone go to a place voluntarily where they are being attacked?

Maybe, it's an important part of the society there, an important forum that the most respected people are using.

Being a part of your local Yik Yak for teenagers is like going to I/O or WWDC, you're in the nexus of the community.

I think those chats acted that way for many teenagers. The location-binding feature is perfect for the insular school communities to create exclusive popular communities.

And to be as mean as they wanted through them.

Also with regards to harassment, Yik Yak would commonly be a place where people go to discuss real life harassment of others.

So, for those unfortunate few, they weren't going to Yik Yak and seeing harassment, rather, they never went, but their harassers used Yik Yak to discuss, refine, and promote the real life harassment.

I think it's very complicated to try and insert ourselves back into the insular school mentality to try and understand this, but I think it's simple that Yik Yak was/is a popular tool for coordinating real life bullying.

ams61102• 9 years ago

School (I'm speaking of high school and younger) isn't the real world. Many things that are perfectly legal for adults are prohibited in school because they disrupt the mission that the school is trying to accomplish. There's certainly a grey area but things like dress and speech codes are well established and for good reasons. A service like yik-yak has no real benefit in an environment like that. In fact I don't even know why schools allow personal mobile devices at all.

As far as universities go, yes I think "if you don't like it don't go there" is much more realistic. Those students are all adults and by that age have mostly (certainly not completely) outgrown the most petty type of cliquishness and bullying that permeates the junior high and high school social scene.

soneca2• 9 years ago

I believe you are wrong in assuming this blasée attitude is the right one or obvious one for everyone.

In a way you are overestimating the maturity of teenagers and young adults. In another way I think you are overestimating your own (and anyone's) ability to handle personal offense on a topic that you are sensitive about from a person that you know and it is close to you (you don't know who is, but you know you know the person, that's the point of hyper local).

The article touchs on that. One thing is a person saying things you don't like on TV directed to the masses. Another thing is a person far from you and who you don't know saying bad things directly to you and your friends. And yet another thing is someone you know and it is close to you saying bad things directly to you and your friends. This last one is much harder to act like you don't care.

But, ultimately, it is not about being right or wrong, it is about exercising empathy. Understanding that people react differently to situations and we have to consider that if we care for them. Doesnt matter if we personally would react so much better than them or not.

brickmort• 9 years ago

My thoughts exactly. I don't like the idea of a culture where it's ok to think "you're saying things I don't like, so you should be banned from saying it completely". its unhealthy and causes more harm the more it's permitted.

mcphage• 9 years ago

its unhealthy and causes more harm the more it's permitted

Interestingly enough, that's something that's even more true about sites for anonymous smearing of people in your local community.

jasonlotito• 9 years ago

How do you turn off real life though? These online streams aren't limited to existing just online. They spill over into the real world.

Why do you think bomb threats shouldn't be taken seriously? What about death threats? What about threats to do you bodily harm? When they start to harass you in the real world, where do you draw the line? At what point do you stop taking things seriously?

And before you brush all this off as "Of course that shouldn't be allowed" that's literally what is being discussed here, and you completely missed it.

brudgers• 9 years ago

Ralph Koster's experience with online communities has informed his views. They are sophisticated because the problem is messy: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024060/Still-Logged-In-What-AR I look at online communities differently.

The problem from Koster's perspective is that when the target of harrassment/abuse/etc. turns off the source feed the feed still goes into the target's community. The communications analogy is not hanging up the telephone. The harrasement/abuse/etc. is delivered in public. Even if the target does not see it, the target's community does.

Perhaps an analogy is that one afternoon all of the target's neighbors opened their mailbox to find a flier falsely asserting that the target was a child molester. Most of the intended effect stems from the target's neighbors reading the flier. It doesn't matter much if the target read it. And in conversations with neighbors, "no I did not read it" does not make it better...and the fact that there are conversations with neighbors means that not reading the flier is not a way of avoiding the harassment/abuse/etc.

Atheros• 9 years ago

You started out talking about harassment and abuse but then gave an example of only libel.

OliverJones• 9 years ago

If consenting adults were the users, I'd agree with you.

But, in my town, this Yik Yak was used by high school, and some older middle school, students to trashtalk each other, both in particular and in general.

In my view it would be a good thing if parents of teens stopped footing the bill for the addictive devices that deliver services like Yik Yak and Instagram for that matter. For one thing, they'd save a bundle. For another, we as a community would have less cybersafety to worry about.

Good riddance to yik yak and the fratboy w##kers that created it.

iClaudiusX• 9 years ago

Why bend over backwards and cut yourself off from your college community just to cater to jerks? Do you think the mods of HN are "hyper-sensitive pricks" for trying to preserve the quality of discourse here?

People seem to live under this illusion that the internet is somehow completely removed from real life, that the bigotry and hate doesn't count if it's over a computer. "Just close your eyes and pretend it isn't happening. So what if people are calling your house, your employer, your family; stalking you everywhere you go; threatening to kill you on an hourly basis; calling in a SWAT raid. Just ignore it!"

On the contrary, I think it's long past time our society grew up and stopped trying to make excuses for outrageously bad behavior. These aren't harmless pranks. They're part of a culture that normalizes hate to the point that it emboldens people to commit violence, on college campuses and elsewhere.

https://wamu.org/story/17/05/24/wake-college-park-murder-cam...

gotothedoctor7• 9 years ago

Thanks for saying this. Threads like this baffle me, make me sad and wonder if its time to just stop visiting this site.

If you don’t mind being bullied, harassed, or threatened, that’s great, but it harms people. Whether you think it should or shouldn’t is irrelevant. Personally I don’t know anyone who has experienced it that wasn’t harmed. YikYak specifically was also horrific for Professors. (& of course, it also had disparate impact on women and people of color). So, either you don’t actually believe it does harm or you don’t care.

Please don’t @ me about free speech or censorship; not only is it irrelevant to startups because they are businesses & not the government, but moderation & boundaries are what make communities endure.

We make choices about what we build & what behavior it will enable. Choosing to permit or even encourage such behavior is not a matter of principles—it’s a choice of who can and cannot participate, which, as YikYak, Secret 4Chan etc show, directly correlates to the viability of the product as a business.

sbov• 9 years ago

You're missing a huge component. I used to play games where people would threaten me all the time. But they were Russians or Danes who lived halfway around the world that didn't even know my real name. Even if they were telling the truth it didn't matter at all.

It seems very different if they know your name. And where you live. And are physically around you all the time. It's not exactly easy to "turn off" that the person sitting in the same room as you has a decent chance of being the same person posting about how they are going to rape and/or murder you.

s73ver4• 9 years ago

The issue is that you're punishing the victim. You're telling the victim of harassment that they're no longer able to participate in the community, despite them not having done anything wrong. And while you might not be interested in participating in things like twitter or YikYak, or even here on HN, others are. And it's really not fair to say, "You got harassed, now you don't get to participate. You have to go sit away from everyone else."

danajp• 9 years ago

I wish the author had spent a bit more time trying to uncover the inside story of Yik Yak as well. It would have been nice to see a post mortem from employees, investors or the founders.

m3kw9• 9 years ago

I can imagine the founders or investors going " hey! bad publicity is good publicity, let's ride it out" without an exit plan

jjar3• 9 years ago

This article seems to miss the point of why Yik Yak really failed. It didn't fail because of bullying, or bad publicity - That doesn't discourage users from using the app unless they're the ones targeted. The app failed because of the ham fisted attempts to control the userbase and remove a problem that did not affect the vast, vast majority of the userbase by introducing the "Handles" feature, and then later making it non-optional.

I'm not even sure if this was a response to harassment, at the time it almost seemed like a pivot for the company - To become the next Snapchat or Facebook, sell targeted ads, and become what every other social company does. This was not what users wanted. It was the only place where people could truly make their thoughts heard without fearing social backlash, which is an issue of incredible importance for University students. And being able to talk with people of a similar age from your University was the perfect gauge for all those things you might want to say but can't. And the handles feature completely removed that. It became extremely easy to tie a person to a handle (Simply watch them while they've got the app open!). There was clear and immediate backlash and people started uninstalling the app en-masse, even posting on the platform about why they were doing so. Yik Yak reversed the update but the damage had already been done - People didn't trust the company to make the right decision any more, and the majority of users never reinstalled.

Note that I'm not saying harassment was good and that the company should have just thrown their hands up in the air and done nothing - The change marking offensive language was welcome, and responding to geo-fence requests in problem areas was fine. But the article fails to mention that the community moderation is incredibly effective. Stupid and offensive yaks were removed quickly through the power of the community - It only took 5 people to say "I don't like this" and you could remove a post.

Perhaps where I was (A small university in the north east of England), we didn't feel any real harassment. People posted racist and homophobic things occasionally, but these posts were quickly removed. Changes to the apps main functionality and appeal came overnight and surprised many people. They now hated the app, aimed at removing a problem that simply didn't exist in the community.

RIP Yik Yak. I'll miss you.

SimbaOnSteroids2• 9 years ago

A major issue I had with yik yak was that it really didn't work if you were going to a commuter school or lived in the suburbs then the local list was dead.

MichaelGG2• 9 years ago

It should have a way to set your location by physically being there X hours a week. Then you could take part in a community even if you sleep somewhere else, but you'd still need to show up to be "in".

Svekax• 9 years ago

I agree. Their app became popular as a place for uncensored, anonymous speech. When they started censoring and requiring usernames their customers spitefully deleted the app.

There are so few places left in the US where someone can engage in free speech. Free speech is nearly nonexistent on college campuses. Yik Yak was offering a product users couldn't find anywhere else. But they threw it all away.

paulcole3• 9 years ago

There are so few places left in the US where someone can engage in free speech.

What?

Do you mean free speech or free speech free of repercussions?

s73ver4• 9 years ago

You can engage in free speech wherever you want. But others are also allowed to engage in their free speech as well, which they can use to choose to rebuke you, and choose not to associate with you.

And free speech is not dead on college campuses. Speech without consequences is dead, and that's probably a good thing.

oculusthrift• 9 years ago

i think everyone is just trying to fit it to their narrative of harassment or free speech when in reality it just wasn't that compelling of a product after a while. At my school it devolved into horny guys trying to get laid and shit talking about professors.

quotemstr• 9 years ago

I'm a big believer in fully anonymous communication. Unfortunately, we live in a censorious age. Those who enable anonymous communication frequently become the targets of legal and social pressure exerted by angry mobs, mobs mostly composed of people who aren't even trying to communicate anonymously. Yik Yak fell in part because, instead of listening to their users, they listened to people who weren't their users.

The next Yik Yak needs to be fully decentralized --- with anonymous development, so there's nobody to sue --- and with a network architecture that resists technical blocking attempts. The next Yik Yak needs to treat censors as adversaries, not partners. Only this approach can bring anonymous communication to its full potential.

WikipediasBad2• 9 years ago

Yik Yak on ethereum?

s73ver4• 9 years ago

Doing so, you're completely ignoring the problem of harassment. Not only ignoring, but basically putting up a huge neon sign saying, "Harassers come here and spew your harassment!" And I would have to consider working on such a project to be completely unethical.

Danihan2• 9 years ago

How exactly does one achieve anonymous development in the walled garden of any of the app stores? Genuinely curious.

DonHopkins3• 9 years ago

To me, Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington sound like joke parody names for clueless rich overprivileged frat boy brogrammers, from an episode of Silicon Valley or The Simpsons.

lgleason• 9 years ago

That was my impression when I saw them speak at the Atlanta Tech Village.....granted that place tends to attract those types but....

pitaa2• 9 years ago

two feminist groups and several former students filed a federal complaint accusing the University of Mary Washington...of failing to protect the female plaintiffs from cyber harassment...

I am confused as to why anyone thinks its the University's duty to protect their students from "cyber harassment." I mean, I am aware of Title IX and all, I am just shocked at the amount of control, influence, and involvement into their students' lives universities are expected to have.

If a student is driving to class and hits a bird (causing them gross emotional trauma) did the university fail to protect them from rouge avians?

ams61102• 9 years ago

Sadly it's what the parents today (who pay the tuition) are demanding. Hence "unique snowflakes" and "helicopter parents." Add to that a healthy dose of media sensationalism to a degree that never used to happen. Everything is drama, crisis, outrage, injustice.

majormajor• 9 years ago

Today? Old news. Decades ago, I grew up in a private Christian school with specially-oriented textbooks (e.g. "Biology for Christian Schools") to avoid exposing kids to information the parents didn't like. Heck, so did my dad (though his was less extreme than mine - more recently, when he discovered more of what the one he'd picked for me actually taught, he apologized... whoops).

Hell, what do you think white parents moving out of integrating school districts to keep their kids away from black students was about? Same damn thing.

lapsock• 9 years ago

Why shouldn't the university offer some form of protection? Even if it's the form of blocking the app?

The police clearly don't give a shit. Someone has to do something. What are universities doing with all that money they get from tuition?

skewart• 9 years ago

Blocking the app is a really extreme move that harms the vast majority of users who are using it in a harmless way.

Imagine if people started putting up fliers that said mean, harassing things on lamposts and building walls around campus. Would tearing down the buildings and lampposts be a good response? If the campus were just a big open field with no buildings or anywhere where someone could put up a mean, harassing flier then the students would be protected from being exposed to them.

No one should be harrased or be on the receiving end of mean behavior. At the same time, there usually is only so much a university or other organization can do to protect its members before those protections have negative consequences for lots and lots of innocent community members.

jessaustin• 9 years ago

What are universities doing with all that money they get from tuition?

Hiring more administrators and athletic coaches.

GhostVII3• 9 years ago

Why shouldn't the university offer some form of protection? Even if it's the form of blocking the app?

Why should the University be in charge of controlling what apps you use? If you don't like the app, don't use it, it's not difficult. Some people liked using it, and it had genuine uses, so blocking it is pretty extreme and pointless. And set's bad precident.

gozur88• 9 years ago

The police clearly don't give a shit.

The police aren't surrogate parents. They're there to deal with crimes.

gotothedoctor7• 9 years ago

Are you really confused? Leaving the law & federal funding requirements aside, Universities seek to have successful graduates & thus it is in their best interest to provide an environment that equips their students to learn. Being harassed undermines these goals, so regardless of the law, it is in their best interest to prevent such disruptions.

I'm not sure I understand the bird analogy. Is the point that Universities can't control birds? Well, Universities can & do already actually demand that their students not harass other students as a condition of their attendance.

gaius2• 9 years ago

Universities seek to have successful graduates

Once, yes, but I wonder if that is true anymore in these days of $60k+/year fees. Do universities make more from undergrads or alumni donations these days? Because if their goal really is successful graduates then they are not setting their students up for success by policing every dispute. It would be completely different obv if YikYak was the "official" app on campus, but the university administration is nothing to do with it, and wouldn't have the power to block it even if they were. What are you expecting them to do exactly?

If a crime has been committed, go to the police, the real police.

golemotron• 9 years ago

If street corner pay phones and phone books were introduced today someone would sue because of the anonymous harassment they enable. It's hard to see where we are now as societal progress.

mythrwy• 9 years ago

You bring up "interest" but original post is about "duty".

They aren't the same thing. Universities might have an "interest" in protecting students from online harassment. That doesn't mean a lawsuit alleging the university has a "duty" to protect students from online harassment has merit.

wand3r• 9 years ago

Equips them to learn

I would argue it equips them for the real world. The internet extends off campus with them when they graduate.

lr4444lr• 9 years ago

When you want the best possible outcome in a lawsuit, you go after the parties with deeper pockets, and the greater incentive to settle.

soneca2• 9 years ago

I agree. No coincidence in Yik Yak shutting down and being absente from the lawsuit I guess. Was it about Snapchat, I would bet it would be included in the lawsuit.

dhimes• 9 years ago

Sadly, you are right-the-fuck on with this comment.

fapjacks2• 9 years ago

So it's nothing new. The lawsuit is about the same old bullshit it's always been about: Money, power, domination, control.

paulcole3• 9 years ago

I am confused as to why anyone thinks its the University's duty to protect their students from "cyber harassment."

Yeah it does seem odd that a university wouldn't want its students to be harassed on campus.

killin_dan2• 9 years ago

Rouge avians -> rogue avians

Rouge avians would just be red birds. Not sure which is funnier in this example.

My school had geese, which were definitely rogue-ass birds.

oliv__• 9 years ago

Seriously. Geese are evil.

chrshawkes2• 9 years ago

I live in the city of Fredericksburg, Virginia. There was a savage murder a few years ago where the girl who got murdered was being harassed on YikYak. I wouldn't go as far as to blame this app for her death but she did receive threats through it, which later turned out to be her roommate who murdered her.

closeparen• 9 years ago

If you're imagining a student driving to class, you're imagining a very different kind of environment.

In the schools where these kinds of demands are made, the university provides your housing, food, utilities, medical care, the centers of your social life (both in terms of facilities and student organizations), local police department, credit union, etc. Even if you live off campus, the entire neighborhood is an (unofficial) extension of the university community. Even if you're at a private business, the university probably owns the building and leases to that business. Private apartment building, your neighbors are all students and faculty.

This typically happens in a small, walkable enclave where it would be very strange for a student to have a car or commute in from outside the enclave. The university owns every part of a student's life in this case, and it's reasonable to think it has some responsibility to keep its community healthy, within reasonable limits.

Your criticism seems more applicable to a commuter/community college, not a residential one.

nv-vn• 9 years ago

Without a totally Orwellian system to deal with this, how could a university respond in this case? I can sort of see where you're coming from, but there's no clear-cut solution that would be in the university's power. It might be their job to protect students from harassment on Facebook (and I would say even that is slightly extreme), but I cannot fathom how a university could even begin to approach monitoring Yik Yak. Would all students be forced to hand in their cell phones and decrypt all their data? Or should we just set up surveillance cameras in their rooms so we can see when they use their phones? Yes, there are reasons for universities to protect their students, but there is clearly a line to be drawn in this specific case.

oneplane• 9 years ago

Sounds like an ignorance is bliss type of story to me. Just because it may not be in some app next time doesn't mean nobody is having the same thoughts or says the same things in some other form. Blaming some app for the existence of harassment seems rather far-fetched to me.

crispytx• 9 years ago

Pretty sure PiperChat killed Yik Yak.

Fej• 9 years ago

I have little sympathy for Yik Yak. One of the other commenters mentioned that it was a forum for shitposting...it's true, almost exclusively. That's no business model. Good riddance.

If you really want local, anonymous communication, make a throwaway account on reddit and visit a given school's subreddit.

If you just want to shitpost, visit /b/.

jjar3• 9 years ago

The ability to shitpost with all types of people from your university was the drawing factor. I am sure that 99.9% of people who go to my university have never heard of 4chan, and maybe 20% (probably less) will use Reddit on a regular basis?

Reddit also brings the issue that you're stuck talking to the same types of people - Generally young, white, nerdy guys. That girl on your rowing team or, the one you met in a club last week and oh so need to know the name of certainly has never heard of reddit - but she will have Yik Yak! The barrier to entry is so low, and it used to be a real talking point on campus. It was a social faux pas not to have it installed.

1337biz• 9 years ago

It was a social faux pas not to have it installed.

So it's all over now? Any alternatives?

chrshawkes2• 9 years ago

I live in the city where YikYak was used to harass an activist at Mary Washington University in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She was later savagely murdered.

Danihan2• 9 years ago

... by her housemate. Over a personal altercation. Nothing to do with YikYak.

GhostVII3• 9 years ago

So the obvious conclusion is that YikYak caused her to be murdered?

rdlecler1• 9 years ago

A problem Yik Yak had was that it was primarily a university level product and because of the proximity features they had to restart their network growth after each vacation. Tying Location with some kind of organization or have a decay function for location based on time spent in that location could have perhaps fixed the issue.

GhostVII3• 9 years ago

I'm pretty sure it died because they started adding accounts and identities and stuff, which people didn't want. When it was fully anonymous it was popular, but once they tried to remove the anonymity, it started to die. It got a bit more popular when they started bringing back the anonymity, but it was too late by then.

The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

Related Stories