Not quite as interactive as Facebook, and not as useful or practical as Twitter, Yik Yak has broken through as the newest way for college students to share their ideas to their communities.
The app allows users to post anonymous messages that are grouped by location. Users can search yaks on various college campuses, and up-vote or down-vote yaks. Yik Yak lets users post about the hilarious things happening around campus, popular news and special events coming to CoMo. Each yak receives a score based on the ratings it receives. The most popular yaks are placed on lists, like hot, that can be seen easier. The official Yik Yak website describes the new medium as, "a local bulletin board for your area by showing the most recent posts from other users around you." The site also encourages users to, "create quality content and receive up-votes from other members of your community."
"Quality content" is a concept that has been used loosely by the Mizzou community. The humorous nature of Yik Yak allows messages such as, "Welcome to the University of Missouri, under construction since 1839," to be made available for all users to see, but the majority of content is trash talk and tasteless comments about other fraternity and sorority chapters.
Yik Yak has the potential to ruin a person's reputation with no actual way of finding out where the hurtful statement came from. While the app includes a feature that automatically deletes posts that are marked inappropriate by two or more users, it has been unable to stop offensive and often made statements from flooding the social bulletin board.
The question for Yik Yak, going forward, is whether or not it can function as an information-sharing bulletin board like it set out to be, or if random insults will overrun the trendy app and kill its legitimacy.
