Yik Yak, an anonymous, location-based app that acts as a sort of local bulletin board, wants to be a serious news source.
Right now, Yik Yak is home to a lot of chatter and huge with college students. That demographic is reflected in the posts found on the app, which are mostly about midterms, Netflix, food and sex.
But its founders, 23-year-olds Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington, have big dreams for the app. They want it to be an on-the-ground, immediate feed of what's happening, especially during breaking news situations. On Monday, they released a new feature, Peek, that lets users drop a pin anywhere on a map and see a feed of posts, or "yaks," from within a 1.5-mile radius -- something that was previously limited to college campuses.
"Imagine people in Ferguson, Missouri Yik-Yaking about what's going on," Buffington told Forbes. "Anytime anything newsworthy happens, people are going to be going to Yik Yak to see what people there are saying."
That serious future could happen, even if it's hard to imagine based on its current users. Twitter owns breaking news for now, but its location-based filtering is cumbersome. Instead, people have to agree on a hashtag, and readers can't easily separate on-the-ground tweets from those who are just following along and sharing. Yik Yak is immediate and strictly local: only those in the area can post, but everyone can now read it.
The app, which launched last November and raised $10 million in June, has mostly made the news for its screw-ups. First, Yik Yak was the place middle- and high-school students went to bully each other -- the "new home of cyberbullying." (The app is now automatically inaccessible when users are on middle school and high school campuses.) Then, it became a place where college students posted violent threats. And anonymous apps were tarnished even further last week when Whisper was hit with allegations of violating anonymous users' privacy.
Yik Yak's biggest hurdle, however, is less sexy but equally important: Right now, its content is mostly pointless.
"It's so f---ing stupid," said Stewart Chiodo, 18, a freshman at the University of San Francisco. "I won't waste my time on it."
The app's spread among college students is undeniable. On a recent afternoon, undergraduate students at USF all said they hear about the app daily, if not more often, even if they don't post on it themselves. Many of them dismissed it as full of unoriginal jokes or boring complaints about college life. But it was still a hot topic. The more people you know who use it, the more interesting it becomes.
"People find it exciting because there's people you know in it. I feel like once you're mentioned on it, you have to join," said Kelsey Duff, a 19-year-old sophomore. "But you don't have to think anything through before you post. It's word vomit. No one cares if you're telling the truth."
They're right. The incentives are all backward. Users gain "yakarma" points when others vote up their posts, usually for being funny. I've only been browsing the app casually, and I've already noticed its lack of originality. Jokes like "Dressing up as my GPA for Halloween because it's so scary" and "Whoever smelt it dealt it, so technically officer, this YOUR weed" have shown up multiple times on Yik Yak -- and they're originally stolen from Tumblr, Twitter and other sites.
"People think, 'What can I say that people will agree with that will get a lot of votes?'" said Soo Lee, a 19-year-old junior.
And it's not always a place to be trusted. One weekend, a user posted a nearby address, said it was a party and wrote, "Bring all your beer" -- and it was the address of a police station, students said.
Users can browse recent or popular "yaks" and vote individual posts up or down.
Yik Yak might be silly, but it has sticking power. The app hasn't left the top 10 American social networking app rankings since late August, when school started for many students. It grew from 200 or 300 campuses at the end of spring to more than 1,000 now, Buffington and Droll said. It was developed in Atlanta, so it's especially popular in the southern and eastern parts of the U.S. -- a unique twist on the traditional Silicon-Valley-first path of a lot of apps. That means it's way more active at Auburn (100 new "yaks" every 30 minutes) than at Stanford (100 every five hours).
Its Southern roots have let it fly a little under the radar as opposed to other anonymous apps like Secret, which got outsized attention earlier this year among tech crowds. Facebook's Josh Miller caused a bit of a stir this month when he tweeted, "The real tech story is that Yik Yak is blowing up ... specifically at colleges." (Yik Yak has only been marketed toward college students, so that last part's not really a surprise, but the app is surprisingly unknown outside of the college and high school age bracket.)
Buffington and Droll aren't deterred. They compare their app to Facebook, which started with narrow college interests but grew steadily into the behemoth it is today. In the meantime, they say they've already seen the way helpful and location-specific news can spread on Yik Yak. They like to point to a time when University of Alabama students spread the word about a serious storm through Yik Yak when the campus alert system was down.
Even Chiodo, the student who said she thought Yik Yak was stupid, had to admit it was a good way to get a casual pulse on a place. And, she added, "I do like the snarky replies. Those are kind of funny." If Yik Yak ever wants to be good for more than a joke, though, it'll have to grow up.
