As a school we seem to be remarkably proud of our “yak game,” which is pretty much like being proud of the scrawl on a bathroom wall except Yik Yak smells less like shit. While Yik Yak may provide some laughs to some, it is a festering example of anonymity gone wrong and offers only an illusion of actual debate. Posting on Yik Yak is the definition of a low-effort, low-reward action, and if you’re putting serious effort into your Yik Yak’s hopefully someone somewhere is praying for you.
The biggest and most intrinsic flaw of Yik Yak is the anonymity it grants its users. It’s almost a fundamental law of the Internet age that if you give anyone anonymity and then also give them an audience, they will not act in a way that serves to better everyone around them, but rather act in a way that would provoke the biggest reaction from their audience. Nine times out of 10 an anonymous poster with an audience will act like a gigantic asshat, as that is usually the easiest way to incite a reaction from their audience. In Yik Yak, this dynamic can be easily examined in the wild by opening the app and finding any post that deals with a topic that could be considered troll bait. A good example of a post that was low-hanging fruit was a fairly innocuous post asking about job prospects for Feminist and Gender Studies majors that was quickly overrun with quips about how “bitching and moaning” and “pleasing the superior gender” were suitable avenues for employment. This is honestly an example that, bear with my here, is not even contending for the crown of “vilest shit anyone has said to another human being on Yik Yak,” which seems hard to believe, but when clearly depressed people post about how they have no friends and people suggest they walk out in front of traffic, quips about the Fem-Gen major begin to seem almost insignificant (they’re not).
Yik Yak is a product of the people who post on it, and most people are comprised of better moral fiber than those who post depraved suggestions to the down and out. Yik Yak gives those individuals both the audience and the anonymity they need to act out their more malicious notions. Anonymity on Yik Yak doesn’t transform all or even the majority of its content into the seriously offensive or dangerous, but if Yik Yak’s content peaks at hilarious once a week, often falls far short of that mark most of the time, and almost certainly contains a form of hate speech at all times, is it really a positive contributor to campus life?
Yik Yak is certainly not a serious medium for any sort of substantial interaction that would be peachy if it was funny more times than it invokes an existential dread about the doomed future of the human race. That’s the other problem: oftentimes Yik Yak doesn’t merely fall flat, it makes you question which sort of neutrons have to misfire in someone’s head to conceive an idea like that.
Yik Yak is like the stable where you take your overused joke and use it to beat the poor horse even deader than it was before. Look, we get it, the squirrels on campus are super unique, cuddly, obese, and fun all at once, but they definitely do not warrant the amount of time and energy people spend on them on Yik Yak. Nobody needs to hear about squirrels 365 days a year at a place that is theoretically an institution of higher learning. The same thing goes for block crushes; post-Rastall poops (that’s a thing), DU jokes, and talking about how strong our “yak game” is. The most depressing of all would be the late night anonymous booty calls that you know never ever came to fruition because no one ever has the balls to actually comment where to go for the booty, because if anyone takes two seconds to think about it, logic overpowers even the mightiest thirst. The best case scenario is meeting up with someone who had to post on Yik Yak to find a hook up and the worst case is too terrifying to even consider writing down.
Sometimes events on campus incite dialogue on Yik Yak that masquerades as constructive or even educational. However, Yik Yak has a voting system that encourages one side of a debate to appear and not the other. If both sides appear, one will appear heavily marginalized like there is a clear majority who disagrees whereas it is mostly a result of whoever down votes their opponents quicker. You can make differing opinions cease to exist with relative ease and a decent reaction time as banishing a comment or post to the shadow realm takes a measly five down votes. So, while it would seem that Yik Yak is providing the medium for conversations in the aftermath of events such as The Hunting Grounds it really is a poor substitute for a conversation on any medium suited for such.
At the end of the day Yik Yak just doesn’t offer anything substantial to anyone’s life, and its meaninglessness belies the amount of time people spend wandering through its halls of mediocre jokes and half clever trolls. Opening Yik Yak is more a compulsion than anything else. Rarely if ever has opening Yik Yak up paid off by enlightening someone’s existence or even brightening his or her day. Every instance when a finger connects with that silly little yak face, someone just lost a little bit of their life they’re never getting back.