I picked a startup called Yik Yak because the name sounded cool.
Now imagine a social media app where you can post anonymously and people within close proximity can read your messages. Now imagine this on a university campus or high school.
Think about a Reddit model where people can comment and upvote or downvote the comments. But instead of showing names, everything is anonymous – yet relevant because it is all within a 5-mile radius.
The first thought that comes to mind is how mean people are with their names clearly displayed, so what if they have total anonymity?
And that was exactly the downfall of Yik Yak.
Cyberbullying. And eventually, someone lost her life when things took a wrong turn.
But yet there are other social media apps with anonymous messaging that is popular and works well. One of these is an app called Whisper.
I had to do some research to understand why these two very similar apps had such different outcomes.
In fact, Yik Yak closed and sold its remaining team in 2017 to a third party but resurfaced in 2021 under the same name – just with much less traction.
So I guess this is a case study about anonymous apps and not just Yik Yak.
So why is Whisper doing so much better and why did Yik Yak fail?
Whisper set out straight from the beginning that the app is aimed at people wanting to post confessions or confidential information without being identified. As opposed to Yik Yak that was open to any type of posting, plus due to geolocation the poster could almost be ‘traced’ once the post was live. In the name itself, Whisper is quite obvious – whisper your secret without being identified.
It sounds very similar to some of the local Instagram campus groups with #justconfessions or similar handles. Students (and others too) love to share their secrets as there is something exciting about airing your deepest secret without the risk of being exposed.
Yik Yak risked this with geolocation and not making it clear what people should be posting which meant everything was allowed.
Bringing me to the next point.
The cyberbullying on Yik Yak got so bad that the app was banned in schools and universities. The developers had to act quickly (which they fortunately did) and ensured that no one within a certain proximity of a high school could post anything, thereby blocking school kids from posting. But of course, this didn’t stop posting outside the predetermined parameters.
What they failed to do is block cyberbullies. And this is an important lesson for any startup. Not just about cyberbullying but about tolerance and what you stand for. As much as a good reputation precedes you, a bad one does too. Those who got bullied on the platform would avoid it in the future and those who heard about the bullying would also want to avoid it. Besides the occasional few, why would anyone want to risk posting (and being exposed) just to be bullied?
Well, that remains a question because I see this happening a lot on TikTok and Facebook Reels. I would watch a video and then go to the comment section for further entertainment. Sometimes it’s harmless or just crazy positive if it was a feel-good video. But these comments can be just as harsh for other average videos because people will rather focus on the negative than the positive.
Not having tried either Yik Yak or Whisper, I got a reassuring feeling from Whisper purely just from the platform where you type a ‘whisper’ and post it. The ‘whisper’ connection is very smart because it makes one feel like you said it softly and not out loud.
I cannot say for sure about Whisper as I didn’t find anything related to this but what Yik Yak did (never confirmed but highly suspected) was to eliminate competitors on its platform by automatically downvoting any post that contained a competitor’s name.
While there are ways and means to eliminate a competitor’s name like perhaps preventing someone from posting until they remove the name, it gets really personal to downvote (basically dislike) someone’s post instead. People won’t take to that kindly, especially if they feel they don’t deserve it.
It is more about anonymity than anything else for me. It doesn’t bother me that the app is anonymous, it intrigues me that people are so keen to post anonymously. I get it to a certain extent if you don’t want someone to know certain things about you. But the freedom of speech and cyberbullying is a big concern.
I see daily on FB mother groups for how they bully each other. Someone asks a question that sounds a bit odd or someone disagrees with and the usual comment is:
“Well if you are going to ask then you must deal with the answers”
And to be honest, I find it sad that we are living in a society where we hide behind a keyboard while dishing out punches to people exposing their vulnerable sides. When did we get so mean?
The new term these days is FOPO – fear of public opinion. This is just a different way of saying cyberbullying because people will say straight-up things like “You are a bad mom for doing X, Y or Z.”
Honestly – WTF?
I don’t think we can stop these apps at all but we still haven’t found a good enough defense mechanism for cyberbullying. The common tactic is to just avoid social media – I even deleted Facebook for years because the content was so negative and I am nowhere to be found on X (Twitter).
So my takeaway is that I don’t want to join an anonymous app any time soon but I am curious to see what this trend will look like in the future.
What is your experience with cyberbullying and anonymous apps?
