Post-Traumatic Yik Yak Disorder
A rumor of the app’s return dredges up horror stories.
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I'm proud to say I never once posted a Yik Yak. I was simply the cruel subject of some 🥰 —Kate
Yesterday, one of many recent tweets that temporarily forced me to reckon with the future of society landed on my timeline. But this one had nothing to do with wildfires or disease. Instead, it was an apparent screenshot of the Yik Yak Twitter profile with a banner reading “Find your herd. Again. August 16.”
Like anyone else who was in high school or college in the mid-2010s, the thought of the potential return of Yik Yak—an app where users, grouped by location, could anonymously post pretty much anything they wanted—sent a chill through me.
My college was one of many cited in a New York Times article about the destruction the app wrought on campuses. During my senior year, a “yakker” encouraged a gang rape at the campus’s womens center. Shortly after, someone snuck into said women’s center and stole all the materials for the upcoming Take Back The Night event, which was a yearly initiative on campus to support survivors of sexual assault and violence. In maybe my first foray into internet culture writing, I published a piece about Yik Yak on our school blog—a piece which was later torn apart on Yik Yak.
If Yik Yak was already a breeding ground for hate speech and abuse in 2015, its 2021 iteration would be almost impossible to comprehend. In the past, posts were upvoted or downvoted by users, and anything with more than five downvotes would be deleted. Yik Yak today would probably be little more than a bunch of fleeting glimpses of vaccine misinformation and woke scolding and racial epitaphs, as every thought from every viewpoint made at least five people mad enough to immediately downvote it into the ether. In that sense, nothing anyone said would matter, which means you could essentially say anything—no matter how harmful.
This is a fruitless thought exercise, though, because as it turns out, Yik Yak is not coming back. Or at least, the screenshot appears to be faked. If you look at Yik Yak’s Twitter profile, the banner is just a picture of an emoji, and they haven’t tweeted since 2019. But the number of exasperated quote-tweets about even the hint of Yik Yak’s return proves those who lived through it suffer from a sort of collective Post-Traumatic YikYak Disorder.
Coincidentally, discussion of the defunct app also bubbled up on TikTok this week.
“If you went to college somewhere around the year 2014, I have a serious fucking question,” user Kat Victoria asks. “Do you remember the app Yik Yak? Where everyone just talked shit on everybody on campus? Or is that something I made up in a fever dream?”
The TikTok has almost one million views, and inspired many comments relating Yik Yak horror stories, like the time someone’s school had to shut down for the day due to a Yik Yak bomb threat, or the time another found out about a shooting in the school library on Yik Yak instead of from the administration.
“YIK YAK SERIOUSLY DESTROYED OUR LIVES FOR NO REASON,” one commenter writes.
Yik Yak shut down in 2017, but the fact that it still elicits fight-or-flight responses from users in 2021 is a testament to its ingenuity, even if it wasn’t used for good. It’s the web version of the atom bomb, teaching us a lesson that must never be forgotten: Just because you can build an explosively popular social media app doesn’t mean you should. How lucky we are that nobody’s done it again.