Yik Yak was one of the funnest things to come out in the last decade but it was too wild and dangerous to be allowed to thrive.
In hindsight though, a huge amount of the posts on there were misogynistic. I keenly remember "slut-spotting" being a trend, with people commenting on girls walking home still dressed up from the night before, telling people to look out for them. Led to a lot of jeering out of windows and the like. Plenty of racist threads also. Targeted cyberbullying too; calling out various people by name and publicly insulting them under anonymity. I distinctly remember having to console a friend who was in hysterics because someone posted a thread about something relatively harmless that she had done, and she was publicly shamed.
It was an entertaining way to spend a few minutes at it's best, but at it's worst was a social weapon for a lot of people who shouldn't have had that level of reach nor anonymity.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/facebook-qui...
But the reboot was just sad! Who in their right mind thought they would be able to revive that cultural moment and moderate the shit out of it?
I work in higher education. You cannot genuinely imagine the heartburn that app gave college administrators across the country. It was amazing. Like a wave of anxiety washed across the country as Deans and Vp's all saw the statistics for bullying and suicide wash across their consciousness.
Silencing people isn't going to make them stop thinking things and preventing discussion won't make them Good(TM) people.
The entire internet doesn't need to be sanitized.
The goal is to encourage actual communication.
Forums didn't have the same issue because they were often single/few topic websites and you could just aggressively remove everything off topic.