Yik Yak has become extremely popular not only at Grove City College but around the world. It is an app that allows people to anonymously post within a 1.5 mile radius of users in your area.
Brooks Buffington and Tyler Droll, graduated in 2013 from Furman University in South Carolina. While in school they worked on a few startup ideas together during their senior year and put their careers on hold to build a company after they graduated.
Yik Yak was born in 2013 and quickly became very popular. Buffington and Droll word spread very quickly and they raised $10 million dollars in funding.
According to businessinsider.com, “Since January, the founders say growth has been organic and the app is used heavily (by thousands of students) on about 250 campuses. At some of the schools, as many as 10,000 students are on it and 100 new messages are posted every ten minutes. At smaller schools, the app has penetrated 80% of student bodies.”
The only negative thing about Yik Yak is that some of the users abuse the fact that everyone is anonymously posting. Some bullying is happening on the site but Buffington and Droll hope to bring the bulling to an end in the near future.
By putting their careers on hold, Buffington and Droll accomplished something incredible. It goes to show that with the right idea and an incredible amount of will power one can push through difficult situations to succeed.
I am very interested to see how they stop the bullying in the future. From what I have heard about Yik Yak is that it is mainly use to anonymously make fun of others. I hope they can improve this feature in the future
After hearing that Yik Yak was a “Big thing” at GCC, I downloaded it to see what it was about. After reading through a few anonymous posts, I was severely disgusted and deleted the app.
I understand their business idea, and it is a really cool concept. However, I don’t think they will be able to put a stop to bullying on this app. The point of the app is to keep it anonymous, otherwise it would be the same as twitter. There is simply no way to stop the bullying, other than not allowing people to make comments anonymously from behind the screen of their cell phones.
Obviously many people, especially students find this app fascinating, which has led to the success of Buffington and Droll. That’s an awesome thing. However, after seeing the incredible shameful posts on the app, even within a Christian College setting, I can’t see the benefit that this app is generating, other than allowing people to express their thoughts without worrying about consequences of people knowing that it’s them.
Personally I have not downloaded the yik yak app, but have heard lots of discussions about it. I quickly realized that typically people either LOVE it or HATE it. It was an innovative and creative idea and I respect that the founders believed in the idea and decided to take a chance on it.