I used to run CollegeACB.com, which usurped JuicyCampus.com and was one of the most popular anonymous college "gossip" sites ever. >20M monthly pageviews and sparse usage at 500+ schools, intense usage at 100+. I sold the business in 2011.
Yik Yak is heavily protected by the Communications Decency Act, and articles like this (generally) just serve to fuel the fire. After Time Magazine, Mike Huckabee, Chronicle of Higher Ed, et. al. tried to draw negative attention to CollegeACB, it only served to strengthen our brand and broaden our footprint.
One needs to understand that sites / services like these aren't going anywhere. They'll continue to enjoy legal protection and benefit from the virality of anonymity and mean-spirited gossip.
One of the most effective forms of dissent I experienced while running CollegeACB were spoiler-filled-spam. If people started posting Game of Thrones spoilers and other such content, I'm sure it would affect usage. Creating petitions, contacting school officials, etc. were totally ineffective, and almost always just made the promise worse.
I'm not terribly proud of my ownership of that site, though I did try to run it with something of a conscience: never called for gossip, voluntarily removed 30,000+ posts, etc. Happy to answer any questions if people are interested about this space.
Hey, Peter. Fellow Wes'12 here. As a student at the most-active school on CollegeACB (CollegeACB was originally developed as a replacement for a LiveJournal-based board active at my school), I saw the good and the bad. It was terrible for some students, who were heaped with anonymous abuse. I was lucky enough to never face that, but I know others who did and saw the negative effects of anonymity first hand.
But there was also a lot of good. During a terrifying two days after a student was shot on campus, it was the only source of information and communication while we were locked down in our dorms. It also helped build a sense of community across cliques, even if nobody would admit to reading it.
On the whole, I'm glad the CollegeACB existed. And anonymity is not going away. With strong moderation and flagging I think the worst impulses can be tempered.
> I'm not terribly proud of my ownership of that site, though I did try to run it with something of a conscience: never called for gossip, voluntarily removed 30,000+ posts, etc.
I think these facts are commendable, and I'm glad you at least made attempts to prevent outright hostility (I'm assuming you removed particularly incendiary messages).
Ultimately it isn't the technology of sites in this space that I'm really curious about, it's more the motivations and intentions of those that create apps in this space. It's easy to paint such creators as vile and or devious individuals looking to exploit the worst of people to make a buck. In reality, I don't want it to be that simple...at least not everytime. So, I guess I'm most curious as to your motivations and expectations for CollegeACB when compared with the actual outcomes.
You mention usurping JuicyCampus, which had its fair share of negative criticism. Was your goal to replace/compete with JuicyCampus or was this an unfortunate side effect?
What drove you to sell the site? Was your intent to turn a buck or did the content and the way the site was/is used eventually turn you off on being associated with it?
Hindsight is 20/20, and you mention not being proud of owning CollegeACB. How did you feel about it at the time, when the site was enormously popular?
> So, I guess I'm most curious as to your motivations and expectations for CollegeACB when compared with the actual outcomes.
I'll address CocaKoala's (similar) question here as well. First a little backstory: I "inherited" CollegeACB from the original creators who had grown weary from the moral quandaries of running the service and lacked the time/effort to expand the business. I was a very ambitious 18 year old college Freshman (now 24, a '12 grad) and contacted the owners asking to take over the site (they kept an equity stake and I did all the work + invested my own cash). I had seen how it was used at my alma mater-- mostly for "legitimate" secrets (IE: "I have an eating disorder and just regressed. Someone who's been through this-- help!") or community-type postings (IE: "What does one wear to Psi U's 'sex party'"). For the most part, it was fairly productive and mean-spirited comments were few and far-between and were generally removed through our auto-moderation features (something like 5+ "reports" would delete it automatically). It was also wildly popular; everyone on campus knew about "The ACB" and it was seen as lighthearted procrastination tool that everyone knew not too take seriously. Vile threads were dismissed as "trolls" and people looked at the platform somewhat fondly.
I was happy to improve the technological experience, and had ideas about growing this slowly to other schools. I'll jump now to JuicyCampus below...
> You mention usurping JuicyCampus, which had its fair share of negative criticism. Was your goal to replace/compete with JuicyCampus or was this an unfortunate side effect?
JuiyCampus was always our biggest competitor. We were the upstart to their incumbent. In January 2009, a month after I took over CollegeACB, I learned that JuicyCampus was closing. Despite popular reports, it had nothing to do with the various threats of lawsuits (though there was some merit behind the anti consumer fraud suit, as they weren't deleting posts like they claimed to do in their TOS). I was able to put together a $10,000 deal within about 10 minutes of talking with Matt Ivester (JC CEO) for 2 months of their traffic. They actually gave me a 501 redirect.
It was my intention to bring the "CollegeACB model" of legitimate secrets and productive use to the "raw masses" that would use JuicyCampus merely to slander and insult their peers. Clearly, I underestimated the difficulty in changing a mindset when hundreds-of-thousands of users already have a set agenda in their minds.
We built in a robust moderation queue and I would spend several hours a day removing posts and manually replying to every removal request. Looking back, it was terribly inefficient, but still leaps better than JC (they never removed a post, to my knowledge).
So my goal was to CHANGE the behavior of JC users. I was never successful.
> What drove you to sell the site? Was your intent to turn a buck or did the content and the way the site was/is used eventually turn you off on being associated with it?
Closely connected to the above answer. I had intended to change the spirit of the site, and convert libelous gossip into productive, anonymous-facilitated honest discussion. When I deemed that to be impossible, I began contemplating selling the site.
It's worth noting that the site was very hard to monetize. Even at considerable scale from a great audience, we never made all that much money. The recent "side project" thread reveals that many people's "side projects" were earning much more than this seemingly-wildly-popular site.
Anyway, I was approached by a buyer who indicated that it was his sole intention to "clean up" the site through productive discussion encouragement. In short, he was also wildly unsuccessful, and ended up re-branding the site and then closing it completely within a matter of months.
> Hindsight is 20/20, and you mention not being proud of owning CollegeACB. How did you feel about it at the time, when the site was enormously popular?
I was initially excited by the thrill of running a popular site; being a known personality around campus; doing media appearances and generally feeling like a tech badass. But that feeling faded when I began to recognize the corrosive nature of the site. The feelings that were terribly hurt. College experiences ruined. I was legitimately shaken by the fact that numerous people pulled out of college and/or were put into dangerous psychological situations because of the things written.
I had contemplated closing the site completely and replacing it with a message to "respect your peers," but found a buyer before it came to that. It's now evidence of an "exit," and has been helpful in establishing my track record, but it's not something I usually bring up or tout unprompted.
I'm now seeking retribution, and run a "student first" service in Texts.com, a free textbook exchange and price-comparison engine.
That's really interesting; thanks for taking the time to write it all up.
Do you think that it's possible to build a site or an app that captures the good parts of CollegeACB, without devolving to the bad parts of JC? You mentioned that you had failed to convert JC, and that the guy who bought from you similarly failed, but the fact that ACB was a positive force for a time seems to indicate that on some level the model is sound. If you're starting from scratch instead of trying to change a mindset, are there things that you think would encourage positive behavior over negative?
Or is it more a case of you really have to get lucky with the community, and it's possible with small groups (up to the size of a college, maybe) but not possible with larger ones; at a certain point, the bile just outweighs the brightness?
I think that some communities simply wouldn't ever be able to use it in a productive fashion. To borrow your phrase -- I quite like it -- the bile will always outweigh the brightness. I think that this holds especially true for bigger schools with greek populations.
At smaller campuses, starting from scratch, I think that one could create positive communities. Steps I would take:
1) Stay small, keep it niche, spread through word of mouth alone
2) Start conversations around positive topics, where anonymity plays a key role in facilitating discussion ("Why do you love this school? Why do you hate this school?") etc.
3) Stamp out personal attacks as quickly as possible. Either through manual moderation, or through community-policing tools. Most likely a combination of both. Ideally hand-select proven contributors to serve as volunteer moderators. Reports of mods abusing power should be dealt with swiftly.
4) Build in filters to identify content that may be a personal attack. I believe Secret does something similar, a prompt: "is this about a person?" Honestly, one could probably built a queue of "flagged" content (manual or algorithmic) and have someone on oDesk / mechanical Turk determine whether it references a specific individual.
I think that it would be hard to grow at all quickly while staying true to these principles; and, as I've mentioned, I'm not sure there would be much room to profit. That said, if you had a productive community with those college eyeballs, you could probably use the platform as a way to promote other businesses.
Just a question out of sheer curiosity from a business perpective, how were you monetizing the site? What prompted a buyer to pay what I assume is real money for the site? Was it a 1k, 10k, 100k exit?
I monetized purely via display ads (a lot of second tier networks that would turn a blind eye to the libelous content), with fairly terrible CPM but lots of views.
I believe the purchase also monetized using paid CAPTCHAs (where the viewer has to watch a video / type a phrase), which probably did very well considering the sheer volume of posts.
I don't really know how those applications work. The only problem I have with them is if the person being talked about doesn't have the ability to respond, and for that message to be seen by everyone. If someone wants to say something anonymously, fine - that's their character - but I want to see the character of who they're gossiping about, bullying, to see what the other side of the story is.
One of the most fiendish tactics was to fake a "response" from the attacked individual. An easy way to add even more fuel to the fire, and many/most viewers wouldn't recognize the obvious trick.
Now that would be considered defamation, impersonating a person, etc.. If that can be proven anywhere then that's huge, disturbing, and disgusting. I don't imagine the chances of that coming to light are very high though because people who don't gossip/bully wouldn't be using those apps, so friends of the target wouldn't likely see if there was a response - or if they did I wonder what % of friends would actually ask about the response.
What benefit did you feel a site like that brought to the world? I'm not trying to be catty with that question, I'm honestly curious; a big part of websites nowadays is "We're trying to solve problem X in Situation Y by providing solution Z", and it's hard to see how that sentence gets filled out with JuicyCampus analogues unless it's "We're trying to solve the difficulty of being an asshole while remaining anonymous by providing a platform to do so". Was there some larger cause to CollegeABC, or was it simply "If we don't do it, somebody else will, so we might as well fill the void"?
It's interesting to note that the effective way to get people to stop using the site was to just make it unpleasant for them; that's a clever way to hit them where it hurts, I think.
In short: I originally ran the site at just a few schools, my alma mater being one of them. There, it was used productively and mean-spirited gossip was far from the norm. It helped people get honest advice, ask questions related to events around the school, etc.
When we "acquired" JC, everything changed, as the masses were coming in with an expectation of mean-spirited gossip. Despite my efforts, I could never meaningfully change that mindset.
I spent most of my 2 years running the site fending off competitors that would "let anything go" and were trying to "win" by maximizing the salaciousness of their content.
> One of the most effective forms of dissent I experienced while running CollegeACB were spoiler-filled-spam
That's a very interesting angle, but what you're saying is that the solution is to kill the service, and it's more effective to poison the stream that it is to try to dam it up.
To build off the metaphor: I think that constructing a "dam" is impossible. Even if it marginally affects the flow of the river, the spillover will affect many more communities that might have gone untouched otherwise.
I wonder what the effect would be of running a separate app that culled names from a school and having a drop down or something beside the name (and possibly statements) where others could log or checkmark statements such as "I didn't write this"; "I know this is not true"; "I support this person". For a high school age person a little support might mean a lot.
Thanks for taking the time to post. That spoiler hack is fun.
Does the situation change for Yik Yak when high schoolers use it? I saw somewhere that they geo-fence and are supposed to exclude people from posting at high schools, but that's apparently not working. It also seems relatively easy to get around.
I contemplated building HighSchoolACB.com, but held up because I was 1) unwilling to subject an even younger, cattier population to the service; and 2) unsure of the specific legal ramifications of building a service that was ostensibly "only for those above 18" and yet targeted at an audience that was clearly younger.
My problem with Yik Yak isn't that its anonymous, its that I cannot conceive of a way that it could be used to do anything but hurt people. I read an interview with one of the founders who described a story of how Yik Yak was used for good. A user needed a place to stay and another user offered a spot on his dorm room floor. The problem with this example is that it breaks the design of Yik Yak: in order for this "good" example to occur the users had to give up their anonymity, effectively ruining the point of the app.
Last month I visited a new city and was curious to see what their Yik Yak was like. It was essentially a stream of abusive posts like those featured in the article. While refreshing the app I saw a glimmer of hope. Someone wrote "X is a really nice guy." The post was down voted to invisibility in literally less than two minutes.
I have my beliefs about the importance of freedom of speech and safe, anonymous places for whistleblowers etc. But this is something else. It makes my stomach churn.
I'm readily admit that I am biased on this issue, I've seen first hand how much pain this app causes people.
I'm told that at my old high school there is at least one student on suicide watch who would not be without Yik Yak. Putting aside arguments about freedom, if taking down an app could save a kid's life then shouldn't we do it? If Formspring didn't exist then it is very possible that the four minors who committed suicide in connection to the site[1] might still be alive today.
EDIT: Keep in mind there is a difference between free speech and hate speech (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech). Ditto for libel (ex the article's quoted posts accusing the school principal of molesting children).
There's a great use for an app like this, and it's something I've wanted forever. Unfortunately, the only people who download and install it seem to be assholes.
That reason is alerting people around you to things going on. If I see a firetruck going past my office, I'm going to want to know where it's headed, for a number of reasons (is there anyone I know involved, are people safe, am I going to be delayed getting home, am I in any danger). Local news isn't going to pick up every fire department response.
Or in more positive ideas, a spontaneous block party is happening down at the local ice cream shop. I'd love to walk down there, but I don't know it's happening. Hyper local services would be incredibly useful with leveraging technology to bring a community closer together. Twitter could solve this problem, but I need to know who to follow. With hyper-local services like Yik Yak, I wouldn't need to follow anyone. The information would just be there.
>if taking down an app could save a kid's life then shouldn't we do it?
It's not technology's problem, it's society's. We could save millions of lives by getting rid of cars. Thousands by getting rid of cell phones. There's a reason we don't do that. There's a much easier answer to the problem of how to protect children from being bullied on Yik Yak: teach your kids the value of walking away.
> That reason is alerting people around you to things going on. If I see a firetruck going past my office, I'm going to want to know where it's headed, for a number of reasons (is there anyone I know involved, are people safe, am I going to be delayed getting home, am I in any danger). Local news isn't going to pick up every fire department response.
Or in more positive ideas, a spontaneous block party is happening down at the local ice cream shop. I'd love to walk down there, but I don't know it's happening. Hyper local services would be incredibly useful with leveraging technology to bring a community closer together. Twitter could solve this problem, but I need to know who to follow. With hyper-local services like Yik Yak, I wouldn't need to follow anyone. The information would just be there.
Ok, so you want a local information app (Circle?). Why does anonymity have to be central to such an app?
> We could save millions of lives by getting rid of cars.
Cars exist for a clear purpose with clear benefit. Here, the costs are deemed acceptable considering the benefits of rapid travel. What are the benefits of Yik Yak? As I noted in my original post, even the creators of Yik Yak couldn't come up with a "good" example of Yik Yak that followed its anonymous design.
> teach your kids the value of walking away
Yes, it would be lovely if all parents everywhere instilled morality into their kids. That isn't the case. Some kids have crappy parents, or no parents at all. When a student posts something that causes a death there are two victims: the suicide, and the kid who has to live with the fact that their actions resulted in death. Most of the bullies in the Formspring suicides were kids themselves, too immature to understand the impact of what they were doing.
As well, I'd like to add a third victim by this lack of morality (well, I'd prefer the term civility but I'm good with either in a pinch!). Society as a whole.
Although we'd like all kids to be rational, understanding, and mature they simply aren't. I don't think many adults are either. We're ruled by our emotions and if people insult us (or our hair, clothes, etc..) we feel awful on some level even if we know not to care about the insult. Kids even more so.
If we could all be reasonable, rational, respectful we'd be good. But the jerks of the world have ruined it for us and walking away and burying our heads in the sand isn't always possible or the right thing to do.
>Why does anonymity have to be central to such an app?
Anonymity doesn't have to be central to what I'm describing, but it would certainly help with getting people to use it. One less barrier.
You're playing the "but think about the children!" card, and I don't know a single person on earth who respects that argument at face value. Kids are kids, and you can't ban everything that could hurt someone's feelings. Everyone has to learn reality sooner or later.
Yik Yak serves a good purpose. It brings up those things that can't be said without anonymity. It allows you to push people's buttons in a way that you can't when your name is attached. Maybe you are the person that nobody likes but nobody wants to tell you. Yik Yak can help you out. Maybe all of your peers think you are a slut, but nobody says it to your face. Yik Yak brings it out into the open.
Yik Yak is dangerous and disruptive because we don't know how to deal with such forward criticism. Even more, nothing on Yik Yak is necessarily true (though you wouldn't say it if you didn't think it seemed at least partially correct).
Yik Yak enables forward, hard hitting, juicy criticism (gossip, lies, and simply outrageous nonsense, etc). And while the immediate result is pain, criticism is important on an individual level just as it's important that we can criticize our government.
The damage that Yik Yak causes is the result of us not being able to handle criticism. At the highest level, I welcome the flow of knowledge and hope that it leads us to a better place overall.
But that doesn't mean I'm ignoring the immediate problems. People have likely committed suicide as a result of all the openness. But that's not a problem with the technology, that's a problem with how we approach ruthless criticism. We might be stuck with the technology, but we aren't stuck with the devastation. It's a different type of bullying and criticism that we need to learn how to deal with, and that we need to prepare our children for.
You seem to forget the fact that on the internet anonymity makes us even bigger liars and assholes. Also that these are kids going through puberty and the like, not a tribe of super mellow and "rational" people.
Even beyond that, extremely personal attacks are rarely "constructive criticism". "This guy is super ugly" isn't going to be super helpful on a personal improvement level.
Negative feedback on a personal level also rarely works. This talk was about performance reviews, but it covers the criticisms of people's personality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI#t=1402
If you're not willing to defend speech you disagree with, or find repulsive, then you don't support free speech. Popular and uncontroversial speech doesn't need any protection, because nobody is trying to ban it.
Not sure where you live, but a lot of what is quoted in the article would be libel - is libel allowed as 'free speech' anywhere? The anonimity of users allows breaking of rules is a bit beyond anything I'd support.
I'm not trying to make a blanket case for the acceptability of hate speech or libel, but I think there are situations where allowing them is useful.
If you are, deep down, a hateful racist, it's better that everyone else is at least aware. If for the most part you are a nice and reasonable person, there's a chance you'll be corrected and come to accept the incorrectness of your beliefs.
On the other side of things, what if everybody does share the opinion that X comes too close to the sexual harassment line on a frequent basis. It's easy to imagine that libel would appear on Yik Yak about X. But now X has a big red flag and is more careful to respect people's boundaries, fearing legal action.
This doesn't cover all cases, and doesn't pardon all libel. But especially with anonymous comments (it's not a reputable source like The Guardian), a tool like Yik Yak can help to relieve social tension, or at least bring up topics that everyone is otherwise too afraid to approach.
Libel isn't saying disagreeable things, it's knowingly lying about someone in a public context, such that it causes them harm.
It's not saying that you believe people of ethnicity X are inferior, or that gay folks and people who don't believe in your god are evil and deserve to die. It's saying, "John Doe is a child molesting, drug dealing, goat blower who's gonna steal all the shit from your apartment and tank your startup with his shitty code."
I can't see where there's value in society in allowing such speech.
Well, if someone says or implies that these students shouldn't be legally allowed to say the things they say, that's an issue with free-speech consequences. It's really quite patently obvious.
Now with that said, of course, it's important to what we have in the US isn't a constitutionally-given right to Absolute Free Speech, we have a natural right to some very high measure of freedom in our speech and a constitutional prohibition stating "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech" (and jurisprudence extending that down to many non-Congress government entities).
Congress and other bodies can and do make laws which, say, prohibit a variety of things like direct incitement to prompt, violent action... or fraud... or malicious mischeif... things which may involve speech, but for which the courts have said certain restrictions can pass muster anyway, if they're limited enough. And our jurisprudence does afford local school boards and principals additional power on their own campuses.
Anyway...
I'll just say that it would be really nice if people used their freedom of speech more nicely than all this.
>Well, if someone says or implies that these students shouldn't be legally allowed to say the things they say, that's an issue with free-speech consequences. It's really quite patently obvious.
HAS somebody said or implied that? I certainly didn't notice it in the article; it seems like what you're saying here is "Well, if somebody makes it an issue about free speech, then it's obviously about free speech", which I'm not going to argue with but is also not really the point.
Hate speech is a different matter, that's why it's not legally protected. I believe in the first amendment, both the freedom it grants and the limitations it imposes. Harassing a kid because he's gay or African American isn't protected, and I'm OK with that.
As a form of protest or whistleblowing, anonymity is absolutely useful. Wikileaks needed anonymity to really work, and Twitter users in Turkey reporting on unrest there see the need for anonymity.
The problem is that while you could conceive of a noble purpose, very few people are going to use it for that purpose, least of all US high school kids.
Letting kids be terrible to each other so that they can see first hand how it unpleasant it is. Through that experience they will become more compassionate adults.
Possible, sure. Anything is possible. But you're acting like Formspring bullying was the one discrete event that pushed these kids to suicide. These people were clearly subject to offline bullying as well (by the same people), it just so happens that the formspring variety leaves a paper trail.
I'm not an expert on cyberbullying, but there were a few cases that happened when I was in high school. At least at the school I attended, the victims had never been accosted by the bullies in person. But then again, I have a single-digit sample size.
That's one of my all time favorite episodes because no matter how ridiculous "MeowMeowBeanz" is portrayed to be, it's totally possible. People will try to validate creating these apps, but at the end of the day they're profiting from bullying ("cyber" bullying is redundant these days) and young people's inability to ignore what's being said about them. It's pathetic.
Well I think the resolution is the same too. The only way to deal with this specific issue is to not participate. Implicitly all those people who are being effected by this are enabling it by participating in the activity.
I actually think this is easier to deal with then its non digital counterpart. Sure its easier to spread the gossip in a digital forum, but it should be known to be false. When gossip spreads through physical networks ( and is therefore not anonymous ) there is a much higher perception of reliability, and its much harder to shake then a completely unreliable and anonymous post on a gossip site which is not ever for a second pretending to be accurate
How is just ignoring this shit not an option? Am I that far removed from HS culture at 33? My HS was full of asshole bastards that would say anything about anybody just to get a reaction.
We didn't have social media, but if a juicy rumor got started it only took about half a day to spread to the whole school. Hands down the best way to beat them was to not give a fuck. Just don't feed the trolls. Bullies are motivated by a reaction and as long as you're not being physically harmed you shouldn't give them one.
As a brief summary, the story discusses a man who lives in a small town in the US. Like many small towns, residents frequent a website called Topics where gossip is shared anonymously in much the same way that it is on Yik Yak. One man, whose wife was killed by an ex-husband, ended up on the receiving end of a stream of particularly vicious rumors and lies spread through the site. This gossip, posted anonymously by a single person under multiple pseudonyms, ended up tarnishing his reputation and costing him his job. Keep in mind, this is a community of grown adults we're talking about.
A high school is similar in many ways to a small town in that everyone knows everyone else, which facilitates the spread of gossip. Add to that the lower maturity levels of children and teenagers, and it is easy to see how anonymous gossip can do some serious damage to a community.
Anyway, I can't recommend that episode of TAL enough, it's very relevant to this whole topic of anonymous online forums.
I think part of it is the anonymous nature. When a juicy rumor got spread in your high school, you could figure out who was saying it and write them off: "Oh, whatever; that kid's an asshole and is just out to get me, anybody who's my friend knows to ignore them."
But with this, you don't have that. Maybe the bully from your math class is telling everybody you suck dick for money; maybe it's the kid you just started sitting next to at lunch. All of a sudden it's not just the mean kids who might be spreading rumors, it's everybody in the school and that's pretty hard to ignore.
also, it's worth noting that the way you feel about anonymous slander at 33 is going to be heavily coloured by your maturity and perspective: You've been out in the world for a while, and you know that there's a bunch of bullshit that just doesn't matter. That's an admirable attitude, but let's be fair and recognize that 16 year olds are not really well known for their ability to put high school in context. It feels like their entire life for them because at that point, it is.
Even more, you can confront the person doing you wrong. My daughter recently confronted a girl who was spreading rumors about her and that was that.
It takes no courage at all to act out online. It used to be that if you wanted to spread lies, steal money, run a confidence game, you had to at least have the courage to face your victim. Anonymity can be used for noble purposes but the vast majority of the time it isn't. Whatever noble purpose might be available to someone using Secret or Yik Yak, it's going to get lost in the noise.
Yeah, I get that. I think it is a maturity thing. I mean, the fact that it's anonymous allows me to not care about it AT ALL. Who cares what "someone out there" says? I certainly don't. My life experience, and long time exposure to the internet has taught me that right now, someone, somewhere out in the world is saying just about anything you could think of. You can't care about all of it.
Yeah I really don't see that this is anything more than the 21st century version of stuff written on the bathroom wall. Not that it makes it OK, but it's not anything new (perhaps it amplified, though). Teenagers say stupid stuff, tend to be self-centered, insecure, and can be cruel. Nothing new here. If you take it seriously you're letting the aggressor win.
When someone spreads a rumor, they get a reaction from 3 or 4 people. The fun is to see how far it goes. With an app, they get a reaction from many more.
It's nice to say "ignore it" and when it's 3 or 4 people they can actually do that, but with an app you're talking about the will power of many more people. Much harder to self control.
I would actually think that when it flares like in the story, and everyone is saying outrageous things about everyone else, it would become easier to laugh it off. Everyone would know that it was all bullshit because they were all in on writing it themselves.
That's what I was thinking. I can't imagine ever getting upset because some anonymous person insulted me on some app, or taking anything it said about anybody else seriously. How are people killing themselves over this?
This made me realize: Reddit/HN wouldn't be nearly as valuable without usernames. They allow you to scan someone's posts to see if they have a history of being mean, intellectually dishonest, etc.
I think this is true for HN, less so for reddit, and that it generally depends on the nature of the site.
On HN, we have a small-ish community of people (who are often experts in a particular domain) and an expectation of on-topic, high-level discourse. Comment history is worth a lot here, as it's been vetted by an intelligent, serious community.
On reddit, you have a huge number of people and a very low expectation of what's acceptable to post (in general, of course--specific subreddits are often different). The relaxed atmosphere promotes users who tell jokes or pander to the large userbase, making it harder to identify users whose posts are worth actually reading through. Of course once you have identified a quality poster, it's nice to be able to go through their history. It's just that signals like karma score end up being meaningless at that scale.
Then there's 4chan, with opt-in identity. You can't inspect most users' histories, which means you have to take a submission at face value. And for serious, constructive submissions--admittedly hard to come by sometimes--this rivals the HN model for intellectually honest discussion. You're not just nodding along with well-known users, and you're also not ignoring submissions from people who may have simply slipped up in their past. But users can take a name if they choose, and there are 3rd-party archives which catalog their submissions.
Reddit actually brands itself as a "platform for online communities". Given the nature of subreddits, this does not seem like an unfair characterization.
Sure, but your identity persists across all subreddits. If someone makes an insightful comment on a programming subreddit, for instance, and has a high karma score, you may be disappointed to discover that 90% of their previous submissions consists of cat pictures, jokes, in-depth cartography discussion, and porn.
I guess reddit just feels 'diluted' to me. It facilitates a broad range of discussion and does so fairly well, but I can't think of a subreddit that is actually the best place to discuss any particular topic. It's generally my second or third stop.
Well, it could be highly relevant, but the system isn't (yet?) designed to recognize when two sibling sites have significant overlap, which does occur.
Although throwaways are generally considered acceptable, especially on Reddit. Without some means to enforce single account registration or a real name policy, the same problem exists.
Persistent usernames on Reddit create a culture of identity on the site. Throwaways with no user history that post inflammatory comments frequently tend to get called out and downvoted. That's a very different setting from something like YikYak.
It's worth noting that Reddit exists to discuss topics, hobbies etc. Yik Yak doesn't have a defined purpose to the same extent Reddit does.
This lack of definition combined with the geographically-centered design (you know your audience) makes Yik Yak far more dangerous than Reddit IMO.
There are a lot of good use cases for throwaways (suppose a former cult member wanted to share their experiences, for example). And the fact that an account is brand new is also a data point. You'll notice that Reddit/HN have produced a lot of insightful/informative comments from throwaways.
"people whose opinions the majority of voting members disagree with"
Still true, but I think it is probably easier to allow controversial or less popular opinions in a ranked system than it is to deal with harassment in an unranked system, given the propensity of the voters towards "good." The harassment seen on reddit is very different from the harassment on Yik Yak, Juicy Campus, etc. That guy they thought was responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings, for example.
Of course, Yik Yak and Juicy Campus were designed for this LCD speech.
I think the Online Disinhibition Effect [1] and Greater Internet F*wad Theory should have some kind of multiplier based on age.
Online anonymity–while necessary IMO–has a dark side. You can say "don't blame the medium" all you want, but I don't think it's that simple. When the medium increases the volume/frequency of bad behavior, there will be more bad consequences. Some poor kid will commit suicide because of an app like this. Being a father of 4, that makes me grieve.
I read about suicides from internet harassment from time to time.. and although sad, we don't shut down the internet.
Top poster has it right I believe. Fight it and simply get more attention. Leave this thing alone and it will be so clogged up with nonsense it will be almost unreadable in few months...imop.
But you have to understand, school administrators are going to be under pressure to do something soon. Solutions like spamming such apps with spoilers aren't going satisfy them (IMO).
These situations are why crappy, overbearing laws get put in place by sixty-something year old politicians.
People go to the bathroom to relieve themselves, people use Yik Yak to be entertained[1] by the hurtful gossip people have to say about one another. When I go to a urinal I'm not scanning the walls for slander, and any slander that's there isn't instantly accessible anywhere on campus.
[1] Obviously some users check Yik Yak to see what's being said about them, teachers may check it to be aware of what students are being targeted, etc.
The "FaceBook" existed in Harvard before facebook.com...in other places, it was called "MeetBook" (check out this reference in a 1997 episode of This American Life http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/66/tr...)...but the way Facebook.com facilitates interactions, even in its early college-only days was a real game changer because of the medium, even though it emulated a function of an existing print product.
The speed, permanence, and visibility of Net communication is very much a different game.
(which, if I remember high school correctly, would probably be just about everyone....so you may have a point).
It does seem though that the novelty would wear off after a bit as the deluge of unsubstantiated (and likely repetitive) gossip got less interesting. A flood of information is almost as good as no information for getting people not to pay attention in my experience.
Well, the medium is realtime, so that profoundly changes the kinds of conversations that can be had. I agree with you in principle though, it will blow over after a few months when all the kids have unloaded all their catishness. In the end they will learn a lesson early: nobody wins when everybody is being an asshole.
Anyone makes a post and 17 people feel obligated to argue... even if the point is irrelevant. Very seldom do they even bother to stick around to back up their arguments.
Now, I know everyone wants to appear smart... but really... this is getting kind of silly.
I'm surprised someone hasn't written a Markov Chain-based Yik Yak post generator.
It would learn all the worst insults at a particular school, then apply them to the entire student body at random intervals. After a while, nobody could tell the actual malicious posts from the random posts, so all would be ignored.
A truly dystopian monetization strategy for this type of app would be to let users pay to reveal each other's IP address and/or location (location costs extra).
Edit: Or worse, enable and encourage bidding wars over whose identity gets revealed. It may sound obvious when you actually say it but there's a great potential for evil schemes profiting from "shallow" (not cryptographically ensured) anonymity.
I've said it many times before, but humans are primates. No matter what we say to the contrary, if we act like primates, look like primates, and have the DNA of a primate, we are most likely primates.
Why are adults still surprised when they see young primates act normally? Adult humans spend an incredible amount of time trying to prevent children from behaving in the ways their natures dictate. Are we so surprised that they viciously fight to establish a status hierarchy in high school? All primates do this. Adults do it too, but in a more nuanced way (money, fame, power).
The sooner we start dealing with the reality of what we are, the easier it will be. The more we deny it and sprinkle it with feel-good nonsense, the worst it will become.
While i don't disagree with you, I'd like to share something that recently struck me.
Although I hated the film Tree of Life, there was a pertinent line that has resonated with me since.
"The nuns taught us there were two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow."
"Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. … Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it over them. To have its own way."
The penny dropping moment is when you question nature "goodness". Nature is often perceived to be "the pure way", but we often forget that the pure way can be brutal and unforgiving. Nature is the route of the shortest path, highly optimised to survive and flourish often at the cost of others and without compassion. Grace balances nature.
Some of that is quoted from The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (see Book 3, Chapter 54):
This may surprise you, but I absolutely agree. I am very much in favor of a religious lifestyle. I have come to understand that humans need to feel that there is a greater purpose for their existence in order to temper their destructive desires. Of course, this was probably the insight that led to the creation of the very first religious writings. Our ancestors are not as stupid as we are led to believe. Religious writings are absolutely the greatest works of literature known to man, having been so widely preserved and distributed.
However, there is a small issue. I want to live in a religious society whose morals are practiced, not just preached. I am hard pressed to find such a society. I have no preference of religion, just a preference for a society where people are united in a community and behave cooperatively.
Unfortunately, most capitalist democracies do not work in this fashion. Ruthless competition is the name of the game, and the usurious practices which reduce most men to beasts of burden are rampant. The elected leaders and their elite masters sing songs of virtue, yet ruthlessly undermine the common working man at every step.
What good is the gospel when it is only preached and never practiced?
Addendum: For those interested in the evolutionary history of religious practices, please see Darwin's Cathedral [1].
Why would anyone worry about being anonymously slandered, on a stream of nothing but anonymous slander?
It seems like it would take about 1 day for this to go from truths and half-truths to just a contest for who can write the most shocking or offensive statement. At that point, who cares if it's your name being used on a made up shock-value joke or story? Any real information would be safely obscured by a mountain of false accusations.
Clearly you've never been bullied before. A bully doesn't get bored after a day, it's a continuing pattern of behavior. I had a kid in high school who would say degrading things to me on a daily basis, for months, until I finally realized that I had to get in his face if I wanted it to stop.
But this app isn't a bully picking on you every day. It's every potential bully standing behind a curtain yelling non-stop insults against every person in the school.
Surely it takes most of the sting out of the insult when everyone is getting continuously insulted anonymously.
Can't you? Or to put it another way: in the face of Reason, can the emotion even remain?
If you rationalise and understand the triviality of the situation and the ultimate stream of nonsense that the App apparently is, would this affect you?
It seems one would be emotionally affected upon _failure_ to make this rationalisation.
I'm going to extend my earlier comment to "clearly you've never been clinically depressed." The attitude that "you've got nothing to be sad about, rationally speaking, so logic your emotions away and cheer up!" is a factor in an awful lot of suicides.
You assume everyone uses this site/app/whatever.
Its obvious (for me, maybe Im wrong) that its something for adolescent girls and maybe bullies, normal kids wont find anything interesting there.
"Suddenly, the social 1 percent was subject to the same sort of cyber torment that had in the past been directed at the students at the bottom of the pyramid."
I love the way technology brings about democracy and levels the playing field!
We tend to think of technology with the "a rising tide raises all boats" line of thinking, or at least I do. But this is a pretty clear case of technology dragging everyone down. Yes, it may be an equalizing force, but we don't help the blind by taking the eyes of those with sight; it's equalization in the wrong direction.
I wish there was a solution, but there just isn't one. I think it just needs to run its course; maybe once everyone gets a black eye, they'll realize that it sucks and stop giving them to others. But I don't think it's quite that simple.
I don't think it's a lack of knowledge that is the problem here. Almost all kids are taught the basics of "be nice", "don't be a jerk".
But if someone treats a person badly, and they have the option to get revenge anonymously ... a lot of people find it hard to resist the temptation to hit back. Just this once.
I'm sure most of the students at the school do know that. The app is completely anonymous, so for all we know, the nasty comments could have been made by just a handful of students.
Where in the hell did we decide phones were okay in schools? In the 90's only drug dealers carried pagers, or so the school boards thought, so nobody was allowed to have a later or cell phone on school grounds.
Or do the opposite: scrape facebook to get all the names of people at the school and train an insult generator. Flood the site with random rumors about random people, but let everyone know that's what you're doing so no one knows what is authentic and what isn't.
The real rumors are lost in the noise, kids learn a lesson about trusting anonymous sources and the manipulation of mass opinion, and everyone realizes highschool brattiness is nonsense because you can literally auto-generate it.
Bonus if google makes this a summer-of-code project: eventually the app creators will force everyone to login with their google+ profiles.
I dunno, history has shown that the negative people will win out unless you filter them out.
Most unfiltered communication channels online are known for being horribly negative, not to say there isn't positive content, just that it is minor.
Unfortunately the negative posters have more to gain. By putting down someone they get a minor lift up in their own self-image, while boosting someone does not provide nearly such a strong reaction.
Adding user names can help, as your history becomes public and scrutinizable, allowing you to be proud that you are positive.
Unfortunately the negative posters have more to gain. By putting down someone they get a minor lift up in their own self-image, while boosting someone does not provide nearly such a strong reaction.
I think it has more in common with the phenomenon where in general most feedback is negative because people who are happy with a product/situation tend to not bother looking for ways to express that opinion, where people with a strong negative opinion generally want to find a place they can vent.
> Unfortunately the negative posters have more to gain. By putting down someone they get a minor lift up in their own self-image, while boosting someone does not provide nearly such a strong reaction.
I'd like to disagree with you, but in the end we're all selfish, and clearly anonymous communication is often a channel for negativity.
I feel like your explanation is wrong, but the end result is the same heh.
When I was in grade school, we had the same thing, called "slam books". The kids would write the same sort of gossip about each other in a notebook, and the notebook would get passed around. If a teacher caught you with one, you got punished.
It blazed around for a month or two, then burned out as people just got bored with it.
I expect these new gossip apps will follow the same arc. People will eventually realize that whatever is posted on there is bullshit, and will not take it seriously.
Indeed. If you cannot stop information, or take it back, then the next option is to degrade its value.
If a negative comment about is then echoed over and over but with X replaced with a series of other names then the idea that it's targeted starts to go away.
The fact that something like this exists really shouldn't surprise me this much, but it's still disgusting. And really, the app itself isn't a horrible thing by any means. But, if this was around when I was in High-School I doubt I would have had a good time. I'm not sure there's much you can do really, there isn't any way to ban it as a service, nor do I think that's the best course of action.
The internet can be a truly scary thing, people aren't afraid to say really hurtful things and lies when they're anonymous. IMO, the Principal's suggestion of not looking at it, while a decent suggestion, doesn't make tons of difference when you're walking through the halls and everybody's staring at you and their phone and quietly laughing.
It's truly a sad case of cyber bullying. I don't see how the school can ban the app they can probably ban it from their network but most kids would still be using their cellular data to access the app.
If it is anonymous and unfiltered, it is possible to shit-spam it. Write some server that can find proxies and write random words from dictionaries to fill up so that it becomes impossible to filter the mean from the nonsense.
Gotta take them by their game ! However, if it grows with too many people that have the free time to post (ala 4chan) this strategy becomes too difficult. For a highschool, shouldn't be too difficult ?
Btw, I don't know the specifics of the "app", but it could be done, even, with basic captcha imo.
The author of this article is an exceptionally talented writer for a high-school student. And what she describes below seems like a positive development:
One student told Inklings, the school newspaper, that “kids are just mean these days, and they needed a new way to insult each other.” Maybe. I remember when Formspring and Honesty Box infiltrated my middle school hallways. But Yik Yak felt different. It wasn’t just a new tool for the school’s bullies; it was also an equalizer. No one was safe, regardless of his or her place on the social pyramid. Bots and Amigos were targeted just as much, if not more, than the gays, the fat kids, the nerds, the friendless. “K. sounds like she has a cock in her mouth 24/7,” went a typical attack on an Amigo. Staples Guidance counselor Victoria Capozzi says that one student, prior to finding himself the target of a homophobic post, was completely unaware that his peers even questioned his sexuality. Suddenly, the social 1 percent was subject to the same sort of cyber torment that had in the past been directed at the students at the bottom of the pyramid. Yik Yak gave everyone a chance to take down enemies, reveal secrets, or make shit up in order to obliterate reputations. You didn’t need internet popularity in order for your post to be seen; you just needed to be within a 1.5-mile radius of your target and your audience.
It's no surprise that, when left unchecked, teenagers (whose brains actually lack some capacity for empathy) would generate extremely un-empathetic content. And it is certainly not limited to children -- adults can be just as bad or worse.
This is a topic that has come up in different forms many times as the Internet has grown. One way to reign in the vitriol would be to force everyone to use their real names (see Google+'s 'real names' policy), but I don't feel this should ever be a requirement for participation in an online service. For the service itself to require it is one thing, but if the government ever tried to enforce this I'd consider it a human rights violation. (The debate over real names vs. pseudonymity vs. anonymity is a topic I could go into at much length).
In the case of Yik Yak, rather than shifting blame onto the app, I instead wonder how/why any parents would allow their children to freely install such apps on their phones. Sure, kids will be kids (and will always find covert ways of misbehaving), but there should be some form of supervision available for parents of smartphone users, don't you think?
I think Louis C.K. has a pretty smart perspective:
> a school that was “different,” a school that rose above petty high school malice.
Almost sounds like petty malice is something that wants to exist and, if kept away through the most well-meaning efforts, will eventually turn up all the more virulent.
Could there be some sort of (relatively) safe outlet for such impulses, something that can be both carthatic enough and somehow contained in its impact (e.g. available one for one day every month)?
I expect it would be useful to have such an app that suddenly "unlabelled" and gave out everyone's identity. The blow back would be pretty huge and it might make an impression on some of the teens that their outlook was not just wrong, it was counter productive.
Subpoena the information from the app creator. Don't know the app creator? Subpoena the information from the app stores. Can't serve process on (can't get a hold of) the app creator because he's out of your jurisdiction or whatever? No problem. Enjoin Apple and Google from providing it in their app stores. When the app creator's lawyer comes to contest the injunction (to get their app back), hit him with the subpoena.
"Equity will not suffer a wrong to be without remedy."
How long do you think it would take to get an app removed from the iOS and Android app stores? How long do you think it would take a replacement to get made and publicized on the app store?
Well if it's anonymous there might be a simple solution...
Get a list of all highs school students, write 20 or 30 standard insults and flood the the thing by script.
Make those who want to read gossip really work to pick it out.
We are part of the problem. We incentivize creation of net-negative utility apps like this in the hopes of procuring the ever elusive VC funding (proof that you've made it). We chant the lie of 'progress' and 'disruption' for it's own sake. We tolerate a nascent celebrity culture not unlike Hollywood.
Turn it off. Streisand effect again. The more people complain the more people hop on board and start the insults and the more people who read them. People need to learn to exercise good judgement and stop blaming technology for social problems.
I wonder if this is what being a telepath would be like. Hearing all the vile thoughts of everyone in a certain radius. If everyone had the ability would we develop a sense akin to smell with BO standing for Brain Odour?
Ha I forgot about both of these. Yeah they were pretty vicious. There was some other app that facilitated anonymous on campus chat with fruit pseudonyms(i.e. "you are now chatting with Blueberry") but I can't remember what it was.
I was anti shutting them down, even though I think they were mostly posted on by horrible vindictive people.
Events like this do bring schools to a stop. Sure, attendance still happens, but no educating happens. Other events cause similar results: prom, winning state in some sport, or lockdowns for various real and imagined threats.
Given that the stated purpose of school is learning[1], things that massively interfere with that shouldn't be taken lightly.
1. There are a lot of arguments to be made that this is really a much lower priority.
It's ludicrous for this to be anything other than hilarious.
Causes: kids are bored, kids are allowed to use cell phones in class (what?), they've never actually had to take anything seriously, and adults will always validate their shenanigans by acknowledging it, so: they search for drama, can get it from social media, "take it seriously" just feeding the drama, and they get their money shot of the principal and lawyers getting involved.
It's child pornography and the only sick part is the adults who are getting off to it, but apparently that doesn't matter either so I'm just sitting here hoping someone doxxes a pair of plots out of whoever this "M." chick is.
Yik Yak is heavily protected by the Communications Decency Act, and articles like this (generally) just serve to fuel the fire. After Time Magazine, Mike Huckabee, Chronicle of Higher Ed, et. al. tried to draw negative attention to CollegeACB, it only served to strengthen our brand and broaden our footprint.
One needs to understand that sites / services like these aren't going anywhere. They'll continue to enjoy legal protection and benefit from the virality of anonymity and mean-spirited gossip.
One of the most effective forms of dissent I experienced while running CollegeACB were spoiler-filled-spam. If people started posting Game of Thrones spoilers and other such content, I'm sure it would affect usage. Creating petitions, contacting school officials, etc. were totally ineffective, and almost always just made the promise worse.
I'm not terribly proud of my ownership of that site, though I did try to run it with something of a conscience: never called for gossip, voluntarily removed 30,000+ posts, etc. Happy to answer any questions if people are interested about this space.