About four years ago, an app by the name of “Yik Yak” was made by creators Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington, and the basic purpose of it was to function as an anonymous message posting app, not too dissimilar from Twitter, except the fun of the app was that you could basically add any sort of text post that you want, and no one could know who wrote it. The app quickly became popular on college campuses and high schools in 2014, but quickly lost its popularity in 2016 after it became a site rampant with harassment and bullying, making it the enemy of school administrators everywhere.
Now, Yik Yak is back, and it just so happens to be under new management, so there’s a good chance that the app will soon be undergoing a comeback.
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The new owners of Yik Yak have yet to be formally introduced, but they seem to want to foster a whole new environment for the app than what Droll and Buffington had created; the new owners want Yik Yak to be a place where strangers can be kind to each other and be respectful of each others’ views, but also a place where people don’t have to be afraid of being who they are, and they can post the things that they can post without the fear of judgement.
The app is available to download on the iPhone. However, the app isn’t easily searchable on the Apple App Store, but the link is pretty easy to find (like right here) and it is free to download. The app is currently only available for iOS and Apple products, and it is not available for Android, although this is liable to change in the future. Yik Yak is also a location-based app, which means that you need to allow the app to know your location.
The way the app works is like this: people can post whatever they want to the app anonymously, and users have the choice to either upvote whatever posts that they like and downvote whatever posts they don’t like. Upvoting a post can actually make a post more popular, while too many downvotes to a post can actually remove the post from everyone’s feeds. Users also have the option to comment on any sort of post that they like, and, of course, you’re free to post anything that you like so that you can gain your own upvotes.
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Everyone wants to be able to have some sort of anonymity on the Internet, and the growth of technology has somewhat made this harder and harder over the years. Judging by how popular the app was in the 2010s, there’s really no telling how people are going to receive the app in today’s times. The only hope is that the app doesn’t go down the same path that it did in the past because that’s the future that the new owners want to avoid. Only time will tell how people will like the app, but we can hope for the best.