The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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?
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.
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?
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.
When people say this, it comes with an implied "except for some people". Lots of people deny it, but it's true. I like adding this implicit addendum to posts on Facebook explicitly, because every time, the person says something like, "Oh, no, I mean that for everyone." And then I say "You mean everyone including, for example, Richard Spencer?" Now, I don't care about that guy, but I was fairly astonished at how many people were normalizing political violence that time when somebody punched him. That's when I first understood viscerally that every one of those statements about inclusion and tolerance comes with an implied "except for some people."
Hiring more administrators and athletic coaches.
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.
The police aren't surrogate parents. They're there to deal with crimes.
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.
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.
To be clear, no one is suggesting that Universities should be "policing every dispute." I am stating that Universities can and do seek to create the most effective learning environment for their students--and that harassment undermines this goal. This is why Universities, as indicated in the article, blocked (aka geofenced) YikYak (& though it is not mentioned, other apps as well).
Not sure I understand how that's relevant, but most University rules are not laws--but, while breaking them may not be criminal or even illegal,it can still get you thrown out of school.
Coddled students don't make successful graduates, as evidenced by the interns that were fired last year after writing a petition about the office dress code that they thought was unfair [2], failing to understand that their job was not a democracy.
Of course, there are times a university should get involved, such as if the harassment is coming from a professor or university-owned email address. But at some point, the most I think should be expected from the university would be a referral to a therapist so the student can work through things and learn coping strategies. It may sound callous to say, but like it or not there are plenty of things that can be upsetting, hurtful, or emotionally damaging to someone without actually being illegal or even reasonably preventable. The university could help to make their graduates successful by making sure they are capable of coping with this fact of life.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/judith-shu...
[2] https://www.inc.com/alison-green/about-those-interns-fired-f...
I am arguing that, along with legal duties, Universities have an interest and an incentive to prevent their students from being harassed. To be clear, being harassed is not being disagreed with.
I don't see the relevance of this anecdata & punditry to the issue, nor do I know what "coddled" really means or why such a generalization would apply to every University. Regardless, pattern recognition over decades of experience tells me that people who are new to the workforce inevitably behave as if they are new to the workforce. And also, that with each new generation, pundits offer some variation of "kids these days." On the plus side, if we've moved on to "coddled", maybe people will stop complaining about those damned millennials!
Anyway, even if we disagree, I am glad that you do think that sometimes the University should get involved & that mental health services are useful.
But if people are going to their university and saying hi, I installed this app that you didn't write or tell me to install, and I don't like it, sort it out for me, then that's an unreasonable ask, IMHO. It's like getting angry with a bakery because they won't repair your bicycle.
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.
But, yes, Universities also have legal duties to their students. However, these vary significantly based on too many different factors to speak usefully in generalities (eg based on city & state, public or private, is it a research university, is there some kind of consent decree, etc) and of course, the facts of each case.
More simply: whether a University has a legal duty to protect students from online harassment will depend on the specific situation, but, in all cases, the University will have an interest.
I (for one) believe universities should not have a legal duty to prevent online harrassment, even though it may be of interest to universities.
I'm not arguing there is always a legal duty here, nor that there always should be. I'm stating that whether there is a duty will always depend on the individual fact pattern & the laws/regulations that apply to that specific University.
Not only do Universities operate under different jurisdictions with different rules & laws--but their level of "control, influence and involvement" varies along too. This changes what duty there is--as do the specific facts.So such generalizations are not applicable.
Hope this makes sense; its not easy to explain!
I would argue it equips them for the real world. The internet extends off campus with them when they graduate.
Yeah it does seem odd that a university wouldn't want its students to be harassed on campus.
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.
They're actually delicious though. I like duck, but I can't eat very much because it's so rich, but goose is a less flavorful, but still gamey type of meat. If you haven't ever tried it, I recommend it. Be VERY careful when you are eating it though, biting into a shotgun pellet can crack a tooth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anonymity, and being able to express yourself and talk about your secrets/difficult life issues without worrying about social consequencesz is absolutely something that is valuable to the world.
There are lots of people in the world who feel completely unable to talk to anyone about their personal issues.
The ROI for investors isn't a metric of actual performance. Truthfully basically any monetization method besides random ads or a shop would have killed YikYak just as other non-core features did, and those as well probably would have done it. All change the dynamic of the community in interactions for the worse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What?
Do you mean free speech or free speech free of repercussions?
And free speech is not dead on college campuses. Speech without consequences is dead, and that's probably a good thing.
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.
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/.
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.
So it's all over now? Any alternatives?
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.
Is it open source feasible in walled gardens like apple or google app stores? With respect to dev costs, permissions, tooling?
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...
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.
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.
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
Don't know if that's good or bad from your perspective, but I chuckled at the old school hyperlocal anonymity of it.
She's hotter than I am :)
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.
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.
And saying "Don't go there" isn't really a solution either. While the victim might not be there seeing it, everyone else is. They're still having their reputation damaged by the harassment brought upon them.
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.
Interestingly enough, that's something that's even more true about sites for anonymous smearing of people in your local community.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
"don't @ me" about completely relevant challenges to your opinion that are based on axiomatic political principles is cowardly and foolish. free speech and avoiding censorship are not just legal rights, they are principles that ought to be defended. those who would argue for a world where the de facto standard is censorship because they are capable of a narrow legalistic interpretation of freedoms are hideously short-sighted. if you endorse the erosion of these principles in the venues where you are strong, your enemies will use your exact arguments to erode them where you are weak.
>(& of course, it also had disparate impact on women and people of color)
is there a term for this akin to 'draping oneself in the flag'?
Although I agree with your general sentiment, I think you're being a bit bullish. It's important to understand what, exactly, we mean by "free speech". John Stewart Mill's On Liberty is the starting point for any such discussion.
In the essay, he discusses "freedom of thought" in this very famous paragraph:
But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
The idea of freedom of speech isn't simply that "anything goes." In fact, the Supreme Court has upheld this position many (many) times: see Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire for the canonical example. Preventing shitposting on 4chan or on Yik Yak is not (I repeat: NOT) an infringement of free speech. There are no veritable opinions there. There is nothing that deserves the invokation of Mill's freedom of thought. In other words, there is nothing of value.
Note that this distinction contrasts with something like Bill O'Reilly's The Factor or your annoyingly conservative grandfather, whom you may disagree with, but who also might have some insight.
But there are some things which we've resolved: we know that Nazis had it wrong, we know that racism is immoral, we know that we landed on the Moon. So not giving a platform to anti-Semites, racists, or flat-Earthers is not an infringement of free thought, as Mill described it.
The only purpose of freedom of speech and thought is to protect unpopular, evil, and straight up false speech.
That's fine if you use your platform to exclude those that you don't like.
But we aren't talking about that. We are talking about platforms that explicitly ALLOW this shitposting, and yet other people who don't own the platform are trying to stop it.
Sure, fine, businesses can do whatever they want with their own platform. So how about we allow that? Those that want to censor can censor, and those that don't can not do so.
And it turns out that there seems to be a huge demand for a platform that doesn't censor and allows people to post anonymously. (yik yak only died because it went away from what made it good).
So how about those procensorship people just leave it be and let those of us who disagree with them go to our own platform?
hypothetical: I've just told all your neighbors that you've got a criminal conviction for raping 8 year old children. It's just words, what's the harm?
If we live in a culture where people understand the concept of "people on the internet could be lying", especially with regards to specific, highly serious, allegations against specific people, then someone posting something like that about me wouldn't be a big deal, because nobody would believe them.
There certainly could be "harm", but I'd argue that on average, the harm would have a very low chance of mattering, and I'd rather live in an open society.
The more people are able to talk, the more they are able to get to the actual truth of the matter.
We don't live in that culture. We live in a culture where paediatricians are attacked because a group of people was too fucking stupid to know the difference between paediatrician and paedophile.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.s...
This is patently false. Did you even read the paragraph I quoted? I'm not sure if I even need to get into details here. There are hundreds of historical examples where non-hateful, and non-evil speech was censored. But you're being incredibly disingenuous by lumping in "unpopular" with "evil" -- the two are not even remotely the same.
You're trying to put an equal sign between, e.g., Communism (unpopular) and an anonymous post doxxing a rape victim on social media (evil). Give me a break.
I said don't @ me because I've been in this conversation before & recognize there's little point in arguing when we are clearly defining the concept of free speech very differently.
Maybe I'm missing something, but weren't the majority of targets of harassment on YikYak as I described? Is it not ok to recognize this? Why? If we don't, it won't change.
Its ok that we disagree obviously, but I can't help but note that we are doing so on a privately owned platform that moderates its comments. Maybe you would, but I certainly wouldn't be here otherwise. Which maybe you'd also prefer:)
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.