The app, by its design, was problematic from its inception. A platform where people can say whatever they’d like without disclosing their identity? What could possibly go wrong?...Mean things were said. Bullying. Hate speech. Threats. The company tried to deal with it:
The company tried introducing handles to make the app safer and more enjoyable for users, but this backfired and translated to more targeted harassment. Last August, the company required all users to disclose their identities in order to use the app, but it ultimately wasn’t enough to keep its user base from ditching the app. RIP, Yik Yak. You were a real beast.I've blogged about Yik Yak before. A year or so ago, I read it pretty often trying to see what terrible things might be going on around here in this forum that had been — until they tried to fix it — optimized for uninhibited speech. I never participated, but only eavesdropped, and I found the opposite of meanness and bullying. From my old posts:
1. December 28, 2015: "So I downloaded Yik Yak, because I wanted to see what the students around here are talking about. The #1 thing seems to be that the professors haven't put their grades in yet."
2. March 6, 2016: "By the way, I downloaded Yik Yak after I read that it was full of horrible racist and sexist things. I never see that here. I see, in addition to jokes, people who are trying to get up the nerve to talk to somebody they like, concern about doing well in school, and expressions of joy at having seen a dog."
For anybody around here, I believe, Yik Yak would have worked as a cure for the feeling that other people are mean. It would have made you feel that other people are busy, often shy, and pretty damned nice. But it's gone now, because some tiny percentage of the speech amounted to something that people could point to and call hate.
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18 comments:
This is why we can't have nice things.
There's the bad behavior. And then there's the bad behavior of those complaining of the bad behavior.
No, it went because people using it didn't want to risk being identified in case they expressed wrongthought and when that safety feature went, its popularity went with it.
Do you think that publishing who makes political donations makes for more open democracy or is a tool for bullies to intimidate wrongthinkers? While you're thinking about this I'll reach out to Brendan Eich for a comment.
I think it would be great if the secret ballot was abolished. Why vote in secret? Have you something to be ashamed of? Shouldn't your employer have a right to know how you voted? This could be important in future promotion or layoff decisions.
Biff Buffalo will thrive.
The left is really pushing this hate speech thing. Everyday I'm seeing this phrase being used in general news stories, social media and conversations. They have almost normalized the phrase. It's a scary (but beautiful) thing to watch. The orchastration and group thought involved is unbelievable.
When I tell people there is no such thing has hate speech I get either a confused or angry reaction. Now it seems as if the idea is mainstream.
How long before legal decisions recognize this idea. Trump's election probably slowed the legal uptake but I wonder for how long.
@Owen
I considered using that line when I was writing the post. What stopped me, other than a resistance to cliché, is that I just finished reading "Shattered," where I where I learned "We're not allowed to have nice things" was a running joke/whine within the Hillary Clinton campaign:
"Over the course of a year and a half, in interviews with more than one hundred sources, we started to piece together a picture that was starkly at odds with the narrative the campaign and the media were portraying publicly. Hillary’s campaign was so spirit-crushing that her aides eventually shorthanded the feeling of impending doom with a simple mantra: We’re not allowed to have nice things.... She’d run a successful campaign to paint Trump as unqualified for the presidency and then watched voters who thought he was too dangerous for the job back him anyway. And then, riding high in the polls and coasting toward victory in late October, she’d been rocked by a letter the FBI director sent to Congress implying that a laptop seized in connection with an investigation into her closest aide’s husband’s sexting might yield new evidence in the probe into her server. Palmieri had coined the dark mantra of the campaign— We’re not allowed to have nice things— but it perfectly described the way Hillary processed her loss as she sat in her suite at the Peninsula."
Now that we've decided what you are allowed to say, let's move on to what you will be allowed to think...
Trump's election probably slowed the legal uptake but I wonder for how long.
Trump's election probably hastened the legal uptake.
Campy is probably right in regards to the lower courts. Everyone on the left is still hyperventilating over Trump's win. There is no doubt that if Hillary won, she would have put a leftist on a the court. Then I'm sure there would have been 5 votes to declare hate speech an exception.
At least now we have bought some time. Hopefully Kennedy retires. That'll buy more time.
Prof. A: never get between me and a cliché. But seriously, that excerpt of "Shattered" is sad and creepy. The implications woven into the phrase (see what I did there?) suggest both hardened irony and entitled frustration, and under it a sense of doom that nothing --not all their brains and money and ruthless drive-- could avert.
I share the concern that we will end up with "hate speech" as the exception that swallows the First Amendment. Because the phrase cannot be defined in a bounded and predictable way, that is, objectively. By its nature it is *subjective*, depending for its content on the report of this or that complainant as to his or her inner emotional state. The victim's veto, invoking sentiment not reason, and God help those who disagree.
A perfect metaphor for free speech generally. Trying to surpress the abusers will result in the end of the entire mechanism.
No need for John Waters et al. to wonder why people don't have the "nerve" to tell them they voted for Trump.
Of course, this is the fallacy in the Heineken ad: if the progs in the ad had the power, they'd shut down their opponents pronto.
Yik yak didn't die. It was murdered. Some people just didn't like the feeling that they weren't in on the joke. I downloaded it because my college aged kids were on it constantly when they were home. It fostered a weird sense of community. Even in strange places, like airports with ground stops. You could complain about the guy acting like an awesome at the gate, you could start a party in a bar. It was a real social experience, even for in social people.
Speaking of not having nice things and then waking up with Shattered dreams, ESPN is cutting most of the on air talent, who were recently the top Idols of sports or super sexy interview Babes.
Things they are a changing
Wow, this is terrible news. YikYak was the deep underground, the way to talk w/out the Stazi, a Russian newspaper published in some dark basement. It was the real deal and now some jackasses have ruined it for the rest. I hope that there is a replacement soon, that someone with more balls and money than these kids in Atlanta had.
From your other post: "The funniest lines in the intro from the editor in chief of Vogue were making fun of something that I knew very well Vogue had quite recently, mischievously told us looked exactly right "today."
So it works for apps too. Nothing cool can remain cool. This applies to hemlines, social media apps, and Constitutional meaning. Even the Founding Fathers must eventually be disavowed in the name of ever-present "progress(ivism)".
Palmieri had coined the dark mantra of the campaign— We’re not allowed to have nice things— but it perfectly described the way Hillary processed her loss as she sat in her suite at the Peninsula."
They had plenty of nice things, what they really meant was they can't have everything they want and they think that's unfair.
I highly doubt that hate and bullying is the real reason for this shutting down. I played around with this app for a few months and found it interesting to see what people were talking about in this hyper-local forum. Like Ann, everything I read was either funny, mundane or typical college kid stuff.
I suspect the real reason they are closing shop is there's no way for them to make money off this app. Because everyone is anonymous, there is no personal data to sell and no possible way to do targeted advertising. Imagine being an advertiser: "So wait, you don't know anything about your users at all?" Well, we think a lot of them are in college. We don't really have any data. Ok good luck with that.
But it probably makes more business sense to blame isolated bad elements in the community. People will believe that and the Yik Yak guys will need some venture capital for their next dumb idea.
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