What's the life span of a social media app?

I don't know. Maybe some are immortal. But Yik Yak ended.

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. 

"... the prof asked the one German kid if they had a German dream. He responded, 'We did but no one liked it.'"

I saved the screen at the top of Yik Yak here in Madison last night.

IN THE COMMENTS: HoodlumDoodlum said:

Reddit has a thread with that joke from April 2015... the thread appears to be jokes by teenagers. There are Google hits from May and June 2015, too. Step up ya joke takin' game, WI kids.

Thanks. I should have checked. Yik Yak around here is full of jokes. I guess I wanted to believe that scenario took place around here. 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.

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.

"[Y]ou think you can take it all, like, 'oh my god, that’s so funny, somebody called me a fat cow who deserves to be dragged through the street,' but it does affect you internally."

Said Lena Dunham, about everybody who uses Twitter — "whether you have a million followers or whether you have seven followers, because we all deal with the complexity of people being able to say things to you anonymously from behind the veil of the internet."

"I was like ‘the spelling’s so bad, I’m not taking these people seriously; they have eggs for avatars, I don’t care!’ And you walk through the day and these horrible phrases are being repeated through your head… There are things that affect me; I’m weird, I’m affected by violence, threats of rape, I’m a mess!"

Her solution is not to look at Twitter at all. She writes her own tweets (she says), but sends them to someone else to post for her and to let her "know if there’s an important response."

This corresponds to what I was saying to that philosophy professor, quoted in in the NYT, who was dismayed about the insults she read about herself on Yik Yak. Don't look at it! Stop mentally engaging with it.

And this is a cue to quote 2 of my mother's favorite expressions: 1. "You're only encouraging them," and 2. "He's just trying to get a rise out of you."

"I have been defamed, my reputation besmirched. I have been sexually harassed and verbally abused... am about ready to hire a lawyer."

Wrote the professor who saw what her students were writing about her in Yik Yak, quoted in a NYT article about an app that displays anonymous comments.

I think this is the kind of thing professors should simply ignore. There's meaningless, mindless chatter out there. Getting mad or hurt about it is pointless. It's like worrying about every last thought that might be rattling about in the students' head. Chalk it up to freedom and move on. Teach better classes. Count yourself lucky to be a professor in the first place. Take advantage of the opportunity to grow a thicker skin. It's quite useful!

"Anonymous posts on a smartphone application called Yik Yak are facilitating conversations on college campuses, but the dialogue is not always fit for the classroom."

"Discussions on the app sometimes dredge up racist, sexist, and other degrading content, and students at multiple colleges have been arrested for using Yik Yak to post threats to campus safety."

Yik Yak’s founders, Brooks Buffington and Tyler Droll... envisioned it, they said, as a tool for observational campus comedy.

Brooks Buffington and Tyler Droll... the names alone are already comedy.

Of course, some of the fun is saying the outrageous things you can't say in public with your name attached to it. An example given in the article is — referring to a law professor — "If this woman doesn’t stop talking, I’m going to rape her." Is that a real-life threat that ought to involve the police or absurd, transgressive hyperbole?