After meeting an ignominious end in 2017, the anonymous gossip app once accepted with school students lives again. Yik Yak lower back to the iOS App Store on Monday (sorry, Android users) under new ownership, inspiring a fresh around of interest in the long-dead social network.
📣 ICYMI: After a 4 year hiatus, Yik Yak is handy in the App Store again!
💭 Anonymity, location-based normally, the hot feed & more — the whole lot you used to love about Yik Yak
👋 Now available on iPhone in the US — more countries and devices coming soon!
https://t.co/2B2NCKamdV pic.twitter.com/HUAKh4elcA
— Yik Yak (@YikYakApp) August 16, 2021
With a reputation for rampant cyber-bullying and harassment, moderation woes were crucial to the app’s failure. Once ubiquitous on many college campuses, Yik Yak limped into 2016, laying off most employees and suffering to preserve users engaged. The app tried to pivot away from campus gossip and toward location-based social networking that related year, nevertheless it wasn’t sufficient and the once high-flying social network became sold for scrap.
As co-founders Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington wound down the app in 2017, Square paid $1 million for a couple of Yik Yak engineers and rights to a few of the agency’s highbrow property. The company had raised $73 million and changed into valued around $400 million in 2014, all over its peak. TechCrunch contacted the agency for guidance approximately its new ownership, which is interestingly based usually in Nashville, nevertheless has yet to receive a response.
Though we’re still no longer bound who re-launched it, the new edition of Yik Yak is well acutely aware of the customary app’s pitfalls. After providing a phone number to signal up, a short onboarding collection warns users of a zero tolerance “one strike and you’re out” policy for bullying and threats.
“We’re dedicated to combating bullying and hate speech on the Yik Yak platform by skill of any potential necessary,” the new Yik Yak team, which acquired the rights to expand the app in February, wrote on a relaunched website.
Being conscious of what issues will inevitably rise up on a social network and being prepared to slight the ones problems at scale are two very different propositions. Yik Yak is nameless, notwithstanding it’s also an app targeted on what’s going down IRL close by inside of a tight radius, two factors that could combine to pose even more of a moderation challenge.
Within the new app, a sidebar aspects users towards “stay safe” supplies deal with and array of complications that could rise up on the app, like ridesharing, bullying, sexual consent and COVID-19, however the app doesn’t yet include explicit incorrect information policies.
Another phase in the sidebar deals a list of intellectual health substances and encourages users to downvote and file any bullying on the app so it can be reviewed via the Yik Yak team. The agency says that yaks with a negative ranking from five or more downvotes will be automatically removed from the app’s feed, however we’ve asked the company for more facts about its content moderation plans, adding if a team at Yik Yak is dedicated to the task.
The new Yik Yak is built around location-primarily based sharing and users can share messages, called “yaks,” to any one within a five-mile radius. If you’re in a rural arena or in an alternate way quiet zone devoid of yaks, you can amuse yourself with the confessions that exhibit up on a chart of universal national posts.
For now, many high-score posts are excited chatter about the app’s go back from former Yik Yak devotees — on the whole younger millennials who’ve considering that graduated from college.
A smattering of familiar posts warns that Gen Z-ers too young to have used Yik Yak all over its heyday won’t realize what hit them.
“Is this app now 100% 25-30 year olds?” one post reads. “The Zoomers aren’t able for the go back of the Yak,” an alternate user wrote.
