A Gossip App Brought My High School to a Halt
nymag.com
nymag.com
Yik Yak is heavily protected by the Communications Decency Act, and articles like this (generally) just serve to fuel the fire. After Time Magazine, Mike Huckabee, Chronicle of Higher Ed, et. al. tried to draw negative attention to CollegeACB, it only served to strengthen our brand and broaden our footprint.
One needs to understand that sites / services like these aren't going anywhere. They'll continue to enjoy legal protection and benefit from the virality of anonymity and mean-spirited gossip.
One of the most effective forms of dissent I experienced while running CollegeACB were spoiler-filled-spam. If people started posting Game of Thrones spoilers and other such content, I'm sure it would affect usage. Creating petitions, contacting school officials, etc. were totally ineffective, and almost always just made the promise worse.
I'm not terribly proud of my ownership of that site, though I did try to run it with something of a conscience: never called for gossip, voluntarily removed 30,000+ posts, etc. Happy to answer any questions if people are interested about this space.
It's interesting to note that the effective way to get people to stop using the site was to just make it unpleasant for them; that's a clever way to hit them where it hurts, I think.
In short: I originally ran the site at just a few schools, my alma mater being one of them. There, it was used productively and mean-spirited gossip was far from the norm. It helped people get honest advice, ask questions related to events around the school, etc.
When we "acquired" JC, everything changed, as the masses were coming in with an expectation of mean-spirited gossip. Despite my efforts, I could never meaningfully change that mindset.
I spent most of my 2 years running the site fending off competitors that would "let anything go" and were trying to "win" by maximizing the salaciousness of their content.
I think these facts are commendable, and I'm glad you at least made attempts to prevent outright hostility (I'm assuming you removed particularly incendiary messages).
Ultimately it isn't the technology of sites in this space that I'm really curious about, it's more the motivations and intentions of those that create apps in this space. It's easy to paint such creators as vile and or devious individuals looking to exploit the worst of people to make a buck. In reality, I don't want it to be that simple...at least not everytime. So, I guess I'm most curious as to your motivations and expectations for CollegeACB when compared with the actual outcomes.
You mention usurping JuicyCampus, which had its fair share of negative criticism. Was your goal to replace/compete with JuicyCampus or was this an unfortunate side effect?
What drove you to sell the site? Was your intent to turn a buck or did the content and the way the site was/is used eventually turn you off on being associated with it?
Hindsight is 20/20, and you mention not being proud of owning CollegeACB. How did you feel about it at the time, when the site was enormously popular?
I'll address CocaKoala's (similar) question here as well. First a little backstory: I "inherited" CollegeACB from the original creators who had grown weary from the moral quandaries of running the service and lacked the time/effort to expand the business. I was a very ambitious 18 year old college Freshman (now 24, a '12 grad) and contacted the owners asking to take over the site (they kept an equity stake and I did all the work + invested my own cash). I had seen how it was used at my alma mater-- mostly for "legitimate" secrets (IE: "I have an eating disorder and just regressed. Someone who's been through this-- help!") or community-type postings (IE: "What does one wear to Psi U's 'sex party'"). For the most part, it was fairly productive and mean-spirited comments were few and far-between and were generally removed through our auto-moderation features (something like 5+ "reports" would delete it automatically). It was also wildly popular; everyone on campus knew about "The ACB" and it was seen as lighthearted procrastination tool that everyone knew not too take seriously. Vile threads were dismissed as "trolls" and people looked at the platform somewhat fondly.
I was happy to improve the technological experience, and had ideas about growing this slowly to other schools. I'll jump now to JuicyCampus below...
> You mention usurping JuicyCampus, which had its fair share of negative criticism. Was your goal to replace/compete with JuicyCampus or was this an unfortunate side effect?
JuiyCampus was always our biggest competitor. We were the upstart to their incumbent. In January 2009, a month after I took over CollegeACB, I learned that JuicyCampus was closing. Despite popular reports, it had nothing to do with the various threats of lawsuits (though there was some merit behind the anti consumer fraud suit, as they weren't deleting posts like they claimed to do in their TOS). I was able to put together a $10,000 deal within about 10 minutes of talking with Matt Ivester (JC CEO) for 2 months of their traffic. They actually gave me a 501 redirect.
It was my intention to bring the "CollegeACB model" of legitimate secrets and productive use to the "raw masses" that would use JuicyCampus merely to slander and insult their peers. Clearly, I underestimated the difficulty in changing a mindset when hundreds-of-thousands of users already have a set agenda in their minds.
We built in a robust moderation queue and I would spend several hours a day removing posts and manually replying to every removal request. Looking back, it was terribly inefficient, but still leaps better than JC (they never removed a post, to my knowledge).
So my goal was to CHANGE the behavior of JC users. I was never successful.
> What drove you to sell the site? Was your intent to turn a buck or did the content and the way the site was/is used eventually turn you off on being associated with it?
Closely connected to the above answer. I had intended to change the spirit of the site, and convert libelous gossip into productive, anonymous-facilitated honest discussion. When I deemed that to be impossible, I began contemplating selling the site.
It's worth noting that the site was very hard to monetize. Even at considerable scale from a great audience, we never made all that much money. The recent "side project" thread reveals that many people's "side projects" were earning much more than this seemingly-wildly-popular site.
Anyway, I was approached by a buyer who indicated that it was his sole intention to "clean up" the site through productive discussion encouragement. In short, he was also wildly unsuccessful, and ended up re-branding the site and then closing it completely within a matter of months.
> Hindsight is 20/20, and you mention not being proud of owning CollegeACB. How did you feel about it at the time, when the site was enormously popular?
I was initially excited by the thrill of running a popular site; being a known personality around campus; doing media appearances and generally feeling like a tech badass. But that feeling faded when I began to recognize the corrosive nature of the site. The feelings that were terribly hurt. College experiences ruined. I was legitimately shaken by the fact that numerous people pulled out of college and/or were put into dangerous psychological situations because of the things written.
I had contemplated closing the site completely and replacing it with a message to "respect your peers," but found a buyer before it came to that. It's now evidence of an "exit," and has been helpful in establishing my track record, but it's not something I usually bring up or tout unprompted.
I'm now seeking retribution, and run a "student first" service in Texts.com, a free textbook exchange and price-comparison engine.
Do you think that it's possible to build a site or an app that captures the good parts of CollegeACB, without devolving to the bad parts of JC? You mentioned that you had failed to convert JC, and that the guy who bought from you similarly failed, but the fact that ACB was a positive force for a time seems to indicate that on some level the model is sound. If you're starting from scratch instead of trying to change a mindset, are there things that you think would encourage positive behavior over negative?
Or is it more a case of you really have to get lucky with the community, and it's possible with small groups (up to the size of a college, maybe) but not possible with larger ones; at a certain point, the bile just outweighs the brightness?
At smaller campuses, starting from scratch, I think that one could create positive communities. Steps I would take:
1) Stay small, keep it niche, spread through word of mouth alone 2) Start conversations around positive topics, where anonymity plays a key role in facilitating discussion ("Why do you love this school? Why do you hate this school?") etc. 3) Stamp out personal attacks as quickly as possible. Either through manual moderation, or through community-policing tools. Most likely a combination of both. Ideally hand-select proven contributors to serve as volunteer moderators. Reports of mods abusing power should be dealt with swiftly. 4) Build in filters to identify content that may be a personal attack. I believe Secret does something similar, a prompt: "is this about a person?" Honestly, one could probably built a queue of "flagged" content (manual or algorithmic) and have someone on oDesk / mechanical Turk determine whether it references a specific individual.
I think that it would be hard to grow at all quickly while staying true to these principles; and, as I've mentioned, I'm not sure there would be much room to profit. That said, if you had a productive community with those college eyeballs, you could probably use the platform as a way to promote other businesses.
I believe the purchase also monetized using paid CAPTCHAs (where the viewer has to watch a video / type a phrase), which probably did very well considering the sheer volume of posts.
Exit was on the latter order-of-magnitude.
Does the situation change for Yik Yak when high schoolers use it? I saw somewhere that they geo-fence and are supposed to exclude people from posting at high schools, but that's apparently not working. It also seems relatively easy to get around.
I contemplated building HighSchoolACB.com, but held up because I was 1) unwilling to subject an even younger, cattier population to the service; and 2) unsure of the specific legal ramifications of building a service that was ostensibly "only for those above 18" and yet targeted at an audience that was clearly younger.
That's a very interesting angle, but what you're saying is that the solution is to kill the service, and it's more effective to poison the stream that it is to try to dam it up.
To build off the metaphor: I think that constructing a "dam" is impossible. Even if it marginally affects the flow of the river, the spillover will affect many more communities that might have gone untouched otherwise.
But there was also a lot of good. During a terrifying two days after a student was shot on campus, it was the only source of information and communication while we were locked down in our dorms. It also helped build a sense of community across cliques, even if nobody would admit to reading it.
On the whole, I'm glad the CollegeACB existed. And anonymity is not going away. With strong moderation and flagging I think the worst impulses can be tempered.
Last month I visited a new city and was curious to see what their Yik Yak was like. It was essentially a stream of abusive posts like those featured in the article. While refreshing the app I saw a glimmer of hope. Someone wrote "X is a really nice guy." The post was down voted to invisibility in literally less than two minutes.
I have my beliefs about the importance of freedom of speech and safe, anonymous places for whistleblowers etc. But this is something else. It makes my stomach churn. I'm readily admit that I am biased on this issue, I've seen first hand how much pain this app causes people.
I'm told that at my old high school there is at least one student on suicide watch who would not be without Yik Yak. Putting aside arguments about freedom, if taking down an app could save a kid's life then shouldn't we do it? If Formspring didn't exist then it is very possible that the four minors who committed suicide in connection to the site[1] might still be alive today.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formspring#Controversies
EDIT: Keep in mind there is a difference between free speech and hate speech (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech). Ditto for libel (ex the article's quoted posts accusing the school principal of molesting children).
That reason is alerting people around you to things going on. If I see a firetruck going past my office, I'm going to want to know where it's headed, for a number of reasons (is there anyone I know involved, are people safe, am I going to be delayed getting home, am I in any danger). Local news isn't going to pick up every fire department response.
Or in more positive ideas, a spontaneous block party is happening down at the local ice cream shop. I'd love to walk down there, but I don't know it's happening. Hyper local services would be incredibly useful with leveraging technology to bring a community closer together. Twitter could solve this problem, but I need to know who to follow. With hyper-local services like Yik Yak, I wouldn't need to follow anyone. The information would just be there.
>if taking down an app could save a kid's life then shouldn't we do it?
It's not technology's problem, it's society's. We could save millions of lives by getting rid of cars. Thousands by getting rid of cell phones. There's a reason we don't do that. There's a much easier answer to the problem of how to protect children from being bullied on Yik Yak: teach your kids the value of walking away.
Ok, so you want a local information app (Circle?). Why does anonymity have to be central to such an app?
> We could save millions of lives by getting rid of cars.
Cars exist for a clear purpose with clear benefit. Here, the costs are deemed acceptable considering the benefits of rapid travel. What are the benefits of Yik Yak? As I noted in my original post, even the creators of Yik Yak couldn't come up with a "good" example of Yik Yak that followed its anonymous design.
> teach your kids the value of walking away
Yes, it would be lovely if all parents everywhere instilled morality into their kids. That isn't the case. Some kids have crappy parents, or no parents at all. When a student posts something that causes a death there are two victims: the suicide, and the kid who has to live with the fact that their actions resulted in death. Most of the bullies in the Formspring suicides were kids themselves, too immature to understand the impact of what they were doing.
Although we'd like all kids to be rational, understanding, and mature they simply aren't. I don't think many adults are either. We're ruled by our emotions and if people insult us (or our hair, clothes, etc..) we feel awful on some level even if we know not to care about the insult. Kids even more so.
If we could all be reasonable, rational, respectful we'd be good. But the jerks of the world have ruined it for us and walking away and burying our heads in the sand isn't always possible or the right thing to do.
then
>Why does anonymity have to be central to such an app?
Anonymity doesn't have to be central to what I'm describing, but it would certainly help with getting people to use it. One less barrier.
You're playing the "but think about the children!" card, and I don't know a single person on earth who respects that argument at face value. Kids are kids, and you can't ban everything that could hurt someone's feelings. Everyone has to learn reality sooner or later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#Supreme_Court_case...
With regard to the first amendment in the Bill of Rights, the only "limitations it imposes" are on Congress, not anyone's speech.
If you are, deep down, a hateful racist, it's better that everyone else is at least aware. If for the most part you are a nice and reasonable person, there's a chance you'll be corrected and come to accept the incorrectness of your beliefs.
On the other side of things, what if everybody does share the opinion that X comes too close to the sexual harassment line on a frequent basis. It's easy to imagine that libel would appear on Yik Yak about X. But now X has a big red flag and is more careful to respect people's boundaries, fearing legal action.
This doesn't cover all cases, and doesn't pardon all libel. But especially with anonymous comments (it's not a reputable source like The Guardian), a tool like Yik Yak can help to relieve social tension, or at least bring up topics that everyone is otherwise too afraid to approach.
It's not saying that you believe people of ethnicity X are inferior, or that gay folks and people who don't believe in your god are evil and deserve to die. It's saying, "John Doe is a child molesting, drug dealing, goat blower who's gonna steal all the shit from your apartment and tank your startup with his shitty code."
I can't see where there's value in society in allowing such speech.
Now with that said, of course, it's important to what we have in the US isn't a constitutionally-given right to Absolute Free Speech, we have a natural right to some very high measure of freedom in our speech and a constitutional prohibition stating "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech" (and jurisprudence extending that down to many non-Congress government entities).
Congress and other bodies can and do make laws which, say, prohibit a variety of things like direct incitement to prompt, violent action... or fraud... or malicious mischeif... things which may involve speech, but for which the courts have said certain restrictions can pass muster anyway, if they're limited enough. And our jurisprudence does afford local school boards and principals additional power on their own campuses.
Anyway...
I'll just say that it would be really nice if people used their freedom of speech more nicely than all this.
HAS somebody said or implied that? I certainly didn't notice it in the article; it seems like what you're saying here is "Well, if somebody makes it an issue about free speech, then it's obviously about free speech", which I'm not going to argue with but is also not really the point.
The problem is that while you could conceive of a noble purpose, very few people are going to use it for that purpose, least of all US high school kids.
Yik Yak is dangerous and disruptive because we don't know how to deal with such forward criticism. Even more, nothing on Yik Yak is necessarily true (though you wouldn't say it if you didn't think it seemed at least partially correct).
Yik Yak enables forward, hard hitting, juicy criticism (gossip, lies, and simply outrageous nonsense, etc). And while the immediate result is pain, criticism is important on an individual level just as it's important that we can criticize our government.
The damage that Yik Yak causes is the result of us not being able to handle criticism. At the highest level, I welcome the flow of knowledge and hope that it leads us to a better place overall.
But that doesn't mean I'm ignoring the immediate problems. People have likely committed suicide as a result of all the openness. But that's not a problem with the technology, that's a problem with how we approach ruthless criticism. We might be stuck with the technology, but we aren't stuck with the devastation. It's a different type of bullying and criticism that we need to learn how to deal with, and that we need to prepare our children for.
Even beyond that, extremely personal attacks are rarely "constructive criticism". "This guy is super ugly" isn't going to be super helpful on a personal improvement level.
Negative feedback on a personal level also rarely works. This talk was about performance reviews, but it covers the criticisms of people's personality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI#t=1402
I have a hypothesis that people would tag honestly, but "up" and "down" aren't directly enough associated with moral judgement.
Turn the hate against itself by getting people to hate on the text itself instead of hate via the text.
I actually think this is easier to deal with then its non digital counterpart. Sure its easier to spread the gossip in a digital forum, but it should be known to be false. When gossip spreads through physical networks ( and is therefore not anonymous ) there is a much higher perception of reliability, and its much harder to shake then a completely unreliable and anonymous post on a gossip site which is not ever for a second pretending to be accurate
We didn't have social media, but if a juicy rumor got started it only took about half a day to spread to the whole school. Hands down the best way to beat them was to not give a fuck. Just don't feed the trolls. Bullies are motivated by a reaction and as long as you're not being physically harmed you shouldn't give them one.
But with this, you don't have that. Maybe the bully from your math class is telling everybody you suck dick for money; maybe it's the kid you just started sitting next to at lunch. All of a sudden it's not just the mean kids who might be spreading rumors, it's everybody in the school and that's pretty hard to ignore.
also, it's worth noting that the way you feel about anonymous slander at 33 is going to be heavily coloured by your maturity and perspective: You've been out in the world for a while, and you know that there's a bunch of bullshit that just doesn't matter. That's an admirable attitude, but let's be fair and recognize that 16 year olds are not really well known for their ability to put high school in context. It feels like their entire life for them because at that point, it is.
It takes no courage at all to act out online. It used to be that if you wanted to spread lies, steal money, run a confidence game, you had to at least have the courage to face your victim. Anonymity can be used for noble purposes but the vast majority of the time it isn't. Whatever noble purpose might be available to someone using Secret or Yik Yak, it's going to get lost in the noise.
As a brief summary, the story discusses a man who lives in a small town in the US. Like many small towns, residents frequent a website called Topics where gossip is shared anonymously in much the same way that it is on Yik Yak. One man, whose wife was killed by an ex-husband, ended up on the receiving end of a stream of particularly vicious rumors and lies spread through the site. This gossip, posted anonymously by a single person under multiple pseudonyms, ended up tarnishing his reputation and costing him his job. Keep in mind, this is a community of grown adults we're talking about.
A high school is similar in many ways to a small town in that everyone knows everyone else, which facilitates the spread of gossip. Add to that the lower maturity levels of children and teenagers, and it is easy to see how anonymous gossip can do some serious damage to a community.
Anyway, I can't recommend that episode of TAL enough, it's very relevant to this whole topic of anonymous online forums.
It's nice to say "ignore it" and when it's 3 or 4 people they can actually do that, but with an app you're talking about the will power of many more people. Much harder to self control.
Still true, but I think it is probably easier to allow controversial or less popular opinions in a ranked system than it is to deal with harassment in an unranked system, given the propensity of the voters towards "good." The harassment seen on reddit is very different from the harassment on Yik Yak, Juicy Campus, etc. That guy they thought was responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings, for example.
Of course, Yik Yak and Juicy Campus were designed for this LCD speech.
Persistent usernames on Reddit create a culture of identity on the site. Throwaways with no user history that post inflammatory comments frequently tend to get called out and downvoted. That's a very different setting from something like YikYak.
Are they not also more prone to being hell-banned?
On HN, we have a small-ish community of people (who are often experts in a particular domain) and an expectation of on-topic, high-level discourse. Comment history is worth a lot here, as it's been vetted by an intelligent, serious community.
On reddit, you have a huge number of people and a very low expectation of what's acceptable to post (in general, of course--specific subreddits are often different). The relaxed atmosphere promotes users who tell jokes or pander to the large userbase, making it harder to identify users whose posts are worth actually reading through. Of course once you have identified a quality poster, it's nice to be able to go through their history. It's just that signals like karma score end up being meaningless at that scale.
Then there's 4chan, with opt-in identity. You can't inspect most users' histories, which means you have to take a submission at face value. And for serious, constructive submissions--admittedly hard to come by sometimes--this rivals the HN model for intellectually honest discussion. You're not just nodding along with well-known users, and you're also not ignoring submissions from people who may have simply slipped up in their past. But users can take a name if they choose, and there are 3rd-party archives which catalog their submissions.
I guess reddit just feels 'diluted' to me. It facilitates a broad range of discussion and does so fairly well, but I can't think of a subreddit that is actually the best place to discuss any particular topic. It's generally my second or third stop.
Well, it could be highly relevant, but the system isn't (yet?) designed to recognize when two sibling sites have significant overlap, which does occur.
Online anonymity–while necessary IMO–has a dark side. You can say "don't blame the medium" all you want, but I don't think it's that simple. When the medium increases the volume/frequency of bad behavior, there will be more bad consequences. Some poor kid will commit suicide because of an app like this. Being a father of 4, that makes me grieve.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_disinhibition_effect
I read about suicides from internet harassment from time to time.. and although sad, we don't shut down the internet.
Top poster has it right I believe. Fight it and simply get more attention. Leave this thing alone and it will be so clogged up with nonsense it will be almost unreadable in few months...imop.
But you have to understand, school administrators are going to be under pressure to do something soon. Solutions like spamming such apps with spoilers aren't going satisfy them (IMO).
These situations are why crappy, overbearing laws get put in place by sixty-something year old politicians.
I don't have any kids and so probably tend to take this type of thing much less seriously.
And everyone had to see it on the wall as opposed to having to be informed about and go look for it.
The point? this isn't novel and don't blame the medium.
This sort of app would be much more effective at school-wide dissemination of gossip.
(which, if I remember high school correctly, would probably be just about everyone....so you may have a point).
It does seem though that the novelty would wear off after a bit as the deluge of unsubstantiated (and likely repetitive) gossip got less interesting. A flood of information is almost as good as no information for getting people not to pay attention in my experience.
Gee, I don't see why people are so freaked out by this gatling gun I'm carrying. It's basically a fancier sling to throw things at people.
It's obligatory.
Checking something someone told you about on the smartphone not so much. (Unless you are in high school... then the reverse:)
[1] Obviously some users check Yik Yak to see what's being said about them, teachers may check it to be aware of what students are being targeted, etc.
The "FaceBook" existed in Harvard before facebook.com...in other places, it was called "MeetBook" (check out this reference in a 1997 episode of This American Life http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/66/tr...)...but the way Facebook.com facilitates interactions, even in its early college-only days was a real game changer because of the medium, even though it emulated a function of an existing print product.
The speed, permanence, and visibility of Net communication is very much a different game.
It's a question of which human folly you magnify with your technology. Whether it dies out quickly does not matter once the damage is done.
Also - keep in mind that what you dismiss as a flood could be mistaken for popular opinion by others.
I predict this thing will die of boredom before long. There will simply be too much junk on it.
When someone was on the bathroom wall it was one person or two people... everyone saw it.
You can bet almost everyone noticeable in school will wind up on this thing at some point. Hurt feelings? Sure. But at least you won't be alone:)
Anyone makes a post and 17 people feel obligated to argue... even if the point is irrelevant. Very seldom do they even bother to stick around to back up their arguments.
Now, I know everyone wants to appear smart... but really... this is getting kind of silly.
Oh, don't get me wrong... I don't care. I just can't help noticing this wonky behavior.
> Anyone makes a post and 17 people feel obligated to argue
"Forget it, Jake. It's Hacker News."
I don't know where you went to school, but I certainly didn't see up-to-date gossip on hundreds of students plastered to the bathroom walls.
> passed around in notes
Notes can be viewed by one person at a time and can be entirely removed by a single person.
People have always been mean, but now people can be mean very efficiently.
people have been mean on the internet for quite some time now.
I predict the ease of meanness will make more of it... so much in fact it becomes diluted.
It would learn all the worst insults at a particular school, then apply them to the entire student body at random intervals. After a while, nobody could tell the actual malicious posts from the random posts, so all would be ignored.
Or so I would hope.
Edit: Or worse, enable and encourage bidding wars over whose identity gets revealed. It may sound obvious when you actually say it but there's a great potential for evil schemes profiting from "shallow" (not cryptographically ensured) anonymity.
Why are adults still surprised when they see young primates act normally? Adult humans spend an incredible amount of time trying to prevent children from behaving in the ways their natures dictate. Are we so surprised that they viciously fight to establish a status hierarchy in high school? All primates do this. Adults do it too, but in a more nuanced way (money, fame, power).
The sooner we start dealing with the reality of what we are, the easier it will be. The more we deny it and sprinkle it with feel-good nonsense, the worst it will become.
Although I hated the film Tree of Life, there was a pertinent line that has resonated with me since.
"The nuns taught us there were two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow."
"Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. … Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it over them. To have its own way."
The penny dropping moment is when you question nature "goodness". Nature is often perceived to be "the pure way", but we often forget that the pure way can be brutal and unforgiving. Nature is the route of the shortest path, highly optimised to survive and flourish often at the cost of others and without compassion. Grace balances nature.
Some of that is quoted from The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (see Book 3, Chapter 54):
http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/imitation/imb3c51-59.html...
However, there is a small issue. I want to live in a religious society whose morals are practiced, not just preached. I am hard pressed to find such a society. I have no preference of religion, just a preference for a society where people are united in a community and behave cooperatively.
Unfortunately, most capitalist democracies do not work in this fashion. Ruthless competition is the name of the game, and the usurious practices which reduce most men to beasts of burden are rampant. The elected leaders and their elite masters sing songs of virtue, yet ruthlessly undermine the common working man at every step.
What good is the gospel when it is only preached and never practiced?
Addendum: For those interested in the evolutionary history of religious practices, please see Darwin's Cathedral [1].
1. http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Cathedral-Evolution-Religion-S...
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/13/amid-vicious-bullying-threa...
It seems like it would take about 1 day for this to go from truths and half-truths to just a contest for who can write the most shocking or offensive statement. At that point, who cares if it's your name being used on a made up shock-value joke or story? Any real information would be safely obscured by a mountain of false accusations.
Surely it takes most of the sting out of the insult when everyone is getting continuously insulted anonymously.
If you rationalise and understand the triviality of the situation and the ultimate stream of nonsense that the App apparently is, would this affect you?
It seems one would be emotionally affected upon _failure_ to make this rationalisation.
You assume everyone uses this site/app/whatever. Its obvious (for me, maybe Im wrong) that its something for adolescent girls and maybe bullies, normal kids wont find anything interesting there.
"Suddenly, the social 1 percent was subject to the same sort of cyber torment that had in the past been directed at the students at the bottom of the pyramid."
I love the way technology brings about democracy and levels the playing field!
:)
I wish there was a solution, but there just isn't one. I think it just needs to run its course; maybe once everyone gets a black eye, they'll realize that it sucks and stop giving them to others. But I don't think it's quite that simple.
But if someone treats a person badly, and they have the option to get revenge anonymously ... a lot of people find it hard to resist the temptation to hit back. Just this once.
The Roman province of Judea was a number of things, but a "democracy" wasn't one of them.
A sort of happy uplifting DOS.
Most unfiltered communication channels online are known for being horribly negative, not to say there isn't positive content, just that it is minor.
Unfortunately the negative posters have more to gain. By putting down someone they get a minor lift up in their own self-image, while boosting someone does not provide nearly such a strong reaction.
Adding user names can help, as your history becomes public and scrutinizable, allowing you to be proud that you are positive.
I'd like to disagree with you, but in the end we're all selfish, and clearly anonymous communication is often a channel for negativity.
I feel like your explanation is wrong, but the end result is the same heh.
I think it has more in common with the phenomenon where in general most feedback is negative because people who are happy with a product/situation tend to not bother looking for ways to express that opinion, where people with a strong negative opinion generally want to find a place they can vent.
In particular, posting spoilers to popular shows seemed to really impact usage.
The real rumors are lost in the noise, kids learn a lesson about trusting anonymous sources and the manipulation of mass opinion, and everyone realizes highschool brattiness is nonsense because you can literally auto-generate it.
Bonus if google makes this a summer-of-code project: eventually the app creators will force everyone to login with their google+ profiles.
It blazed around for a month or two, then burned out as people just got bored with it.
Then write a script to post nice things about everyone.
If a negative comment about is then echoed over and over but with X replaced with a series of other names then the idea that it's targeted starts to go away.
The internet can be a truly scary thing, people aren't afraid to say really hurtful things and lies when they're anonymous. IMO, the Principal's suggestion of not looking at it, while a decent suggestion, doesn't make tons of difference when you're walking through the halls and everybody's staring at you and their phone and quietly laughing.
Btw, I don't know the specifics of the "app", but it could be done, even, with basic captcha imo.
One student told Inklings, the school newspaper, that “kids are just mean these days, and they needed a new way to insult each other.” Maybe. I remember when Formspring and Honesty Box infiltrated my middle school hallways. But Yik Yak felt different. It wasn’t just a new tool for the school’s bullies; it was also an equalizer. No one was safe, regardless of his or her place on the social pyramid. Bots and Amigos were targeted just as much, if not more, than the gays, the fat kids, the nerds, the friendless. “K. sounds like she has a cock in her mouth 24/7,” went a typical attack on an Amigo. Staples Guidance counselor Victoria Capozzi says that one student, prior to finding himself the target of a homophobic post, was completely unaware that his peers even questioned his sexuality. Suddenly, the social 1 percent was subject to the same sort of cyber torment that had in the past been directed at the students at the bottom of the pyramid. Yik Yak gave everyone a chance to take down enemies, reveal secrets, or make shit up in order to obliterate reputations. You didn’t need internet popularity in order for your post to be seen; you just needed to be within a 1.5-mile radius of your target and your audience.
This is a topic that has come up in different forms many times as the Internet has grown. One way to reign in the vitriol would be to force everyone to use their real names (see Google+'s 'real names' policy), but I don't feel this should ever be a requirement for participation in an online service. For the service itself to require it is one thing, but if the government ever tried to enforce this I'd consider it a human rights violation. (The debate over real names vs. pseudonymity vs. anonymity is a topic I could go into at much length).
In the case of Yik Yak, rather than shifting blame onto the app, I instead wonder how/why any parents would allow their children to freely install such apps on their phones. Sure, kids will be kids (and will always find covert ways of misbehaving), but there should be some form of supervision available for parents of smartphone users, don't you think?
I think Louis C.K. has a pretty smart perspective:
Almost sounds like petty malice is something that wants to exist and, if kept away through the most well-meaning efforts, will eventually turn up all the more virulent.
Could there be some sort of (relatively) safe outlet for such impulses, something that can be both carthatic enough and somehow contained in its impact (e.g. available one for one day every month)?
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diana-graber/yik-yak-app-maker...
Subpoena the information from the app creator. Don't know the app creator? Subpoena the information from the app stores. Can't serve process on (can't get a hold of) the app creator because he's out of your jurisdiction or whatever? No problem. Enjoin Apple and Google from providing it in their app stores. When the app creator's lawyer comes to contest the injunction (to get their app back), hit him with the subpoena.
"Equity will not suffer a wrong to be without remedy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law#D...
I'd much rather the kids learn not to be assholes to each other.
You can have legal justice or you can have street justice. Yik Yak is an example of street justice.
Make those who want to read gossip really work to pick it out.
Stop the presses!
Seriously, could somebody explain to me why this is front page material?
https://sensortower.com/ios/us/yik-yak-llc/app/yik-yak/73099...
"Cyber Bullying", "Bomb Threats", "Hurtful", "Commit Suicide" ...
That seems to be the use case.
What other app-trainwrecks are to come?
I was anti shutting them down, even though I think they were mostly posted on by horrible vindictive people.
Does the author maybe mean a bunch of people were gossiping?
I hardly see the alarmist tone as justified. But people need SOMETHING to write about I suppose.
Given that the stated purpose of school is learning[1], things that massively interfere with that shouldn't be taken lightly.
1. There are a lot of arguments to be made that this is really a much lower priority.
Causes: kids are bored, kids are allowed to use cell phones in class (what?), they've never actually had to take anything seriously, and adults will always validate their shenanigans by acknowledging it, so: they search for drama, can get it from social media, "take it seriously" just feeding the drama, and they get their money shot of the principal and lawyers getting involved.
It's child pornography and the only sick part is the adults who are getting off to it, but apparently that doesn't matter either so I'm just sitting here hoping someone doxxes a pair of plots out of whoever this "M." chick is.