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Yik Yak — Bulletin Board for everyone near you
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@rrhoover Been following YikYak since their early days. Super hard to moderate these communities, especially with very 'sensitive' cultural issues. For instance, what is considered a joke in community A is seen as harsh in community B.
Such companies tend to build out custom mod tools for the team and hire off-site resources from specialized companies with a strict guideline. YikYak has not been doing this, afaik.
Very curious to see how they go beyond the current setup.
@rrhoover I think they still have a way to go on the bullying front, it's def a hard problem--but as for usage, it gives an incredible view of the sentiment and sort of "private conversations" of those around you. It's interesting. I'm curious how much of an internal priority high schools are for them, or if they're planning only on colleges. // @hunterwalk @joshelman
As much as I'm into technology, most of my college campus had discovered YikYak before I even knew about it.
That being said, I think YikYak's growth is interesting because a hyper local app would not have been possible in years past. We've reached the critical mass where there's enough people with smartphones to participate in YikYak. Think about Color. Hyper local didn't work as well because fewer people had smartphones and it was just generally bad implementation.
I'm excited to see where Yak goes. Don't think it's calming down anytime soon. Next feature... Photos in YikYak?
@TimDalrymple I'm seeing more "follow us on Snapchat" lately. @evanspiegel and team must be working on a way to make this easier than manually entering a username into your phone.
@rrhoover Totally agree. Their Snapchat Stories feature is one of the biggest 'non-pivot-yet-pivoty-features' I have seen in a popular consumer app. Crazy smart execution.
@rrhoover @evanspiegel yeah, so am I. Something similar to a follow button that a person or brand can spread through mobile would be nice. I love the college football stories on Saturday. They get better behind-the-scenes footage than TV networks.
@TimDalrymple @abhic Our Stories is also executed very well. I had a Twitter convo w/ @semil and few others this weekend about it. It feels very "new." He wrote a few words about it here.
Yik Yak hasn't really caught in the SV. The areas around the unis have the most presence, but it's not that active (~1 post a minute)
yik yak helps everybody answer the question: what is happening in the world around me right now. This is a big space they are going after.
It managed to get distribution thanks to the enormous word of mouth it enjoys... The secret to its success lies on combining anonymity (cool factor) with location (thank you smartphones) --> that leads to context (i.e. probably if we are at the same college, we laugh at the same jokes and face the same challenges).
Still early days, yet a lot of the right elements are in place.
@kevincolleran @rrhoover
Disclosure - I am an angel investor in the company.
If they can get past the potential for bullying issues, this could be huge. It's growing faster than anything else I've seen in high school/college.
@orbuch I honestly don't see it transcending the high school and college scenes because of its bullying issues. Sure, Yik Yak has the potential to give an informed macroscopic view of some of the contextual elements that create and otherwise influence a specific community with the safety of anonymity, but there's no incentive to meaningfully contribute to any conversation *because* of its anonymity and the trash-talking precedent with which it was established. On campuses, it's a poorly nurtured echo-chamber of often repressed attitudes looking for an outlet without consequences, which can result in amusing but often deeply insulting conversations. I can't imagine a parent buying into this service knowing that, or college kids using it in any other context.
@orburch @rrhoover @abhic @kylry I actually chose this one too. While I do see bullying as an issue with this service, I don't see a way of them being able to get around this easily. A fix could be possible with some really active *local* moderators that Yik Yak picks. Since they know who is posting most actively, they can choose from there. Those moderators could remove content bullying individuals.
Besides this factor of it, I totally agree that it's blowing up. Most recently I used it on a school trip and every one of us was using it nonstop. It was a normal part of daily conversations and interesting to see some of the use cases.. Although bullying is something this needs to fix, bullying was one of the main use cases I noticed. I think this was due to it being one of the only active forums that contains anonymity and is something thats relevant to people around you, especially in schools, and small towns. Another interesting thing I saw on the trip were reactions after people would post something “controversial.” Usually something would be posted and then taken down after about 15 mins by the person who posted it. Although this claims to be totally anonymous, I think students are getting (somewhat) smarter about making sure they are really careful with what there posting online and who they trust.. Even if they were stupid enough to post it in the first place, they either deleted the app soon after or removed there post after further thinking about it.
(disclosure- I am an investor and Advisor to the company)
This is currently my favorite app (and company). As Ryan mentioned, the usage and growth on college campuses is incredible... reminds me a lot of the early days at FB (I was a very early FB employee). They have made great efforts in proactively minimizing the content/bullying concerns by blocking access to their app on every high school campus in the US. Their exclusive focus is college campuses where users should hopefully be a little more mature.
Although you can only post content to be seen by people physically within a 1.5mile radius of your current location, they do allow you to "peek" in to dozens of college campuses throughout the country... it is pretty incredible to see the frequency of posts and engagement of users on a per campus basis.
In regards to the question on photos- they do not support photos at this point... much more focused on text based content creation/sharing.
@kevincolleran I think you hit the nail on the head with this. The reason why bullying is occurring in my example was due to the audience using it. In more mature audiences (relatively), such as college campuses, I rarely see specific bullying occur. I think the best thing Yik Yak did was block it in High Schools.. Regardless of all of this, I do love the app and some of the conversations are great. I love how active the audience is.
@kevincolleran tons of my high school friends are using peek and checking out what's up on campuses. Lots of social trickle down
I happen to live a block away from a High School and the app is useless for me. Geo-fencing is great in theory but still pretty crude in urban areas.
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