Yik Yak is a pseudonymous social media smartphone application that initially launched in and relaunched in The app, which is available for iOS and formerly Android , allows college students to create and view discussion threads within a 5-mile 8. Despite strong levels of growth in and , following several bouts of heavy criticism in the media over the dissemination of racism, antisemitism, sexism and the facilitation of cyber-bullying , the service saw stagnation in the growth of its user base.
The two started collaborating when they were placed into the same class where they learned how to code iPhone apps. Droll dropped out of medical school just before it started and Buffington put his finance career on hold.
On April 24, , in a Bloomberg article, Block, Inc. On April 28, , Yik Yak announced it would be shutting down due to declining popularity, [ 15 ] and the app ceased to function as of May 5, In May , a student revealed that, after analyzing app data, he was able to gain access to precise locations of Yik Yak users. The accuracy was within 10 to 15 feet and, in combination with user IDs, could potentially be used to reveal users' identities. In March , Sidechat, a competing app, bought out Yik Yak, at an undisclosed price.
Yik Yak was subsequently republished on the AppStore under a different developer name. This funding came five months after Yik Yak was founded, and was intended both to enhance the app, and to market the app both in the United States and overseas. One of the biggest criticisms of social media sites and applications is their inherent potential to feed the growing amount of cyberbullying.
Hurtful comments directed at individuals or groups diminish us all and create a divisive atmosphere of distrust and suspicion. They're useless, they're sources of unhelpful or harmful conversations, and they're a complete eyesore. To remedy the cases of bullying in middle and high schools around the country, Droll and Buffington amended the application to include geofences that work in the background. These unseen fences disable the application within their defined borders. At first these boundaries were installed manually by the developers, but it quickly became clear they would need outside assistance.
