Jane Donnabella
Professor Ben Ristow
Rhetorical Bytes
13th February 2015
(Micro) Analysis Essay: Yik Yak
There is a classic childhood proverb known by nearly every American who has stepped
on a playground between the ages of 4 and 13: “Secrets, secrets are no fun, unless you share with
everyone.” Another, perhaps more appropriate version of the rhyme for the topic of this essay
goes, “Secrets, secrets are no fun, secrets, secrets hurt someone.” This taunt, used by my
ancestors to torture information out of their enemies, still remains a staple of playground lingo
across the U.S. When my generation arrived on scene riding the first wave of widespread
cyberculture and technology accessibility, we used this idea to create accounts on Formspring, an
anonymous forum we could use to bully each other over the Internet during the tender, formative
years of middle school. As we grew older and our Formspring accounts fell to the wayside,
people grew hungry with the need to spread gossip about their peers and colleagues over the
World Wide Web, and smart phone apps began to gain popularity. When these forces combined,
Yik Yak was born to two Kappa Alpha fraternity brothers from Furman University in the year of
2013.1
Definition of a “Yak”: A tiny microblog, similar to a tweet, that can be both
posted and voted on by people in a 5 mile radius. Yik Yak is an app that uses the similar Reddit
concept of upvotes and downvotes, with popular Yaks rising to the top of the “Hot” section on
Shontell, Alyson. “Yik Yak, A 7-Month-Old School Gossip App That’s Spreading Like Crazy,
Has Raise $10 Million.” Business Insider, N.p., 30 Jun. 2014. Web. 24 Feb. 2015
1
the home icon. The app is targeted towards college and university students, and the interface is
extremely user friendly.
So how can one tiny, adorable, mint green icon cause so much controversy?
Open up Yik Yak, and you’re brought to a menu with four sections. The first is “Home,”
the main part of the app, shown with a mountain icon. It contains two sections, “New” and
“Hot.” “New” is a list of the most recent Yik Yaks, and “Hot” is a list of the Yik Yak’s with the
most up-votes in the past 24 hours. At the top left of the screenbar is your “Yakarma,” an
obvious play on the Hinduism notion of karma. Every person starts off with 100 Yakarma points.
A new Yak is 2 or more points, a reply can be anywhere from 2-6 points, upvoting a post or a
reply is 1 point, and downvoting a post or a reply is minus 1 point. Clearly the app encourages
people to provide positive feedback, or no feedback at all. But the option for negative feedback is
available at the detriment of the yakker. The second section, “Peek,” signified by a binoculars
icon, allows people to look at Yik Yaks from other universities and post in featured location
feeds (such as Hogwarts, Classic Movie Quotes for Millennial’s, etc.). This gives a communal
aspect to the app, where users can voyeuristically check out other campuses and contribute
outside of their 5-mile radius. The third icon, a radio labeled “Me,” contains notifications for
upvotes, downvotes and comments on posts and replies, and an archive of previous posts. This is
the basic “Avatar” of the user, with no username or picture available but a clear record of the
users contribution to the app. It also shows a GPS map radius of your location and the area of
Yaks you can view. If a person leaves their radius, the “Hot” and “New” posts change. The
fourth and final icon (an ellipses) shows the All-Time Greatest Yaks, the top Yaks in my area,
other top Yaks, and the option to share, rate, or follow Yik Yak on Twitter. While the poster may
originally feel limited by their radius, the app has gone to great lengths to give them a farther
reach, and at the very least access to other locations.
There are, however, perils that come with the app. With cyberculture comes
cyberresponsibility, and when the power to anonymously post opinions with virtually no
repercussions got into the wrong hands, what originally began as an innocent app promoting the
First Amendment soon devolved into a forum for people to attack each other. Yik Yak trickled
down from its targeted audience of college-aged adults to high schools and middle schools,
where cyberbullying became a huge issue to many public and private educational facilities.2 The
app was quickly banned, or geo-fenced from schools that requested their areas be protected.
Before a person goes to make a post, a list of Rules appears.
The last rule, not pictured, reads, “6. Ride the yak.”
So what is Yik Yak? An open forum to spread hate? A young and
carefree app to commiserate with fellow students? A place of laughter, or a
place of tears? To answer these questions, I’m going to shift the critical lens
to my own school: Hobart & William Smith Colleges. Yik Yak arrived on
our campus in 2014, right in the beginning of the new semester. There must
have been a patient 0 for the app, someone who had heard about it from
their friends back home and decided to bring it up to our school. But
perhaps this was a joint effort; there is the possibility that many patient 0’s
came on campus and created a small Yik Yak culture, from which the app expanded onto other
peoples phones and spread faster than smallpox blankets on a reservation. (Ristow: Too much?)
Wagstaff, Keith. “New home of cyberbullying? Yik Yak gossip app takes off in high
schools.” Today Parents. NBC, 29 Apr. 2014. Web. 23 Feb. 2014.
2
These were the early days of the app, before any of the aforementioned rules were implemented,
and students could still trash talk their peers, using the full names of the targeted with no
repercussions. But Yik Yak became a serious problem for HWS when it was used to verbally
attack a transgender student on campus in the early spring. Members of the William Smith
Congress emailed all of the women on campus, warning students, “The well being of our HWS
population is each and every one of our responsibilities. A safe campus is not only in the interest
of those who have been victimized by Yik Yak. Our reputation as an esteemed campus
community is jeopardized by harassment, as are each of our individual academic, personal, and
extracurricular commitments. The anonymity of this app is not a shield. We all have the
potential to feel the sting, therefore the continued use of this app is harmful to us all. Please be
aware that as Yik Yak has become a problem at other institutions, it has been possible for
administrators to trace the identity of those posting comments through Internet servers and other
forms of technology.” And almost overnight, as soon as people were formally warned that their
identities could be discovered and their words could be pursued by campus safety, the
controversial commentary came to a halt. When people realized they would be held responsible
for their disparaging and hurtful comments, the entire tone of the feed changed. Sure, there were
comments making fun of William Smith Congress and President Gearan for ruining peoples fun.
But the email was the light slap on the wrist people needed to reel in their behavior. Soon
enough, the creators of Yik Yak updated the app and included the 6 rules above plus an
algorithm that prevented people from posting names, addresses, and other forms of hate speech
directed towards racial groups, gender, and religion.
But technology rides on a wave of novelty, and once the newness of an app wears off,
people move on to trendier and better things. Whether the New York Times knows it or not, their
recent front-page article on Yik Yak serves as a death sentence for the app and its creators. If the
app is considered such a national issue that it’s being lambasted and exposed by the secondlargest circulation of Newspapers in the United States, then change is looming on the horizon.
While Yik Yak is currently protected by our first amendment, cyberbullying policies and laws
are starting to tighten up, and there are only so many word filters the founders and programmers
can include before it starts to feel restrictive and unfunny. The harsh truth is that the app is
almost two years old. The reporter for the New York Times article writes, “Yik Yak’s founders
say their start-up is just experiencing some growing pains. ‘It’s definitely still a learning
process for us,’ Mr. Buffington said, ‘and we’re definitely still learning how to make the
community more constructive.’” 3 But are these truly growing pains, or the arthritic creaks
of an app about to be deleted from the iCloud in the sky?
The beauty of Yik Yak is that the community determines the way it is used. It all boils
down to respect, and while the app creators have established regulations to prevent open hostility
and contempt, it is up to the user, and ultimately the campus to decide what kind of forum they
want to be both reading and posting on. Virtual reality has an impact on the real world, and Yik
Yak is living proof of how even in an anonymous setting, people can care about the impact their
words have on others. Yik Yak may be less popular, but it’s presence still remains on HWS
campus. Whether people are complaining about “shitty Sherrill” and campo, furiously Yakking
about the pipe burst in saga, celebrating the end of midterms or just making funny commentary
about life as a college student, somehow it’s still going strong.
Mahler, Jonathan. “Who Spewed That Abuse? Anonymous Yik Yak App Isn’t Telling.” New
York Times 8 Mar. 2015.
3
In an interview with Business Insider, cofounder Brooks Buffington told the reporter,
“When Snapchat first came out, everyone heralded it as a sexting app. Hopefully when we get
past all of that initially, people will realize Yik Yak is not just a place for gossip.”4 The key
difference is that snapchat users can still send nudes. They can use as much inflammatory
language as they want, and send it to as many people as they want. If there’s anything the
founders of Yik Yak should understand, it’s that college students hate to be controlled. Only time
will determine whether this app merely swept the nations campuses as a juicy trend, or if it is
meant to remain as a staple of the college-aged user. But if history repeats itself, it sure looks like
Yik Yak is about to be whacked.
Shontell, Alyson. “Yik Yak, A 7-Month-Old School Gossip App That’s Spreading Like Crazy,
Has Raise $10 Million.” Business Insider, N.p., 30 Jun. 2014. Web. 24 Feb. 2015
4
Works Cited
Shontell, Alyson. “Yik Yak, A 7-Month-Old School Gossip App That’s Spreading Like Crazy,
Has Raise $10 Million.” Business Insider, N.p., 30 Jun. 2014. Web. 24 Feb. 2015
Wagstaff, Keith. “New home of cyberbullying? Yik Yak gossip app takes off in high schools.”
Today Parents. NBC, 29 Apr. 2014. Web. 23 Feb. 2014.
Mahler, Jonathan. “Who Spewed That Abuse? Anonymous Yik Yak App Isn’t Telling.” New
York Times 8 Mar. 2015.