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The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

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Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#111

Post by rhizome »

paulcole wrote: post #86
csydas wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this is entirely fair. YikYak's undoing was doing away with the features that brought people to it; it was a very popular application, and continued to be right up until the de-anonymizing aspects were brought into play. It's function a digital bathroom wall was pretty well executed and in most cases, seemingly a success for interaction. It wasn't really good for anything else besides shitposting, but it…

>It's function a digital bathroom wall was pretty well executed But is that an idea worth executing? $73 million dollars down the tubes on a "digital bathroom wall." I would say I'm amazed that anyone thought this was an idea worth investing in, but sadly, I'm really not amazed at all.

Well sure, when you put it that way. ;)

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#112

Post by gotothedoctor »

nawitus wrote: post #99
gotothedoctor wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was trying to leave law aside:) But, yes, Universities also have legal duties to their students. However, these vary significantly based on too many different factors to speak usefully in generalities (eg based on city & state, public or private, is it a research university, is there some kind of consent decree, etc) and of course, the facts of each case. More simply: whether a University has a legal duty to protec…

The important question is actually "should there be legal duties", which you can determine from the original point: "I am just shocked at the amount of control, influence, and involvement into their students' lives universities are expected to have." I (for one) believe universities should not have a legal duty to prevent online harrassment, even though it may be of interest to universities.

Kindly, I don't think that is the important question because that's not how legal duty works. Basically, there are always legal duties, some of which are codified & some of which are common law.

I'm not arguing there is always a legal duty here, nor that there always should be. I'm stating that whether there is a duty will always depend on the individual fact pattern & the laws/regulations that apply to that specific University.

Not only do Universities operate under different jurisdictions with different rules & laws--but their level of "control, influence and involvement" varies along too. This changes what duty there is--as do the specific facts.So such generalizations are not applicable.

Hope this makes sense; its not easy to explain!

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#113

Post by dvt »

nyolfen wrote: post #106
gotothedoctor wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for saying this. Threads like this baffle me, make me sad and wonder if its time to just stop visiting this site. If you don’t mind being bullied, harassed, or threatened, that’s great, but it harms people. Whether you think it should or shouldn’t is irrelevant. Personally I don’t know anyone who has experienced it that wasn’t harmed. YikYak specifically was also horrific for Professors. (& of course, it also…

>Please don’t @ me about free speech or censorship; not only is it irrelevant to startups because they are businesses & not the government, but moderation & boundaries are what make communities endure. "don't @ me" about completely relevant challenges to your opinion that are based on axiomatic political principles is cowardly and foolish. free speech and avoiding censorship are not just legal rights, they are princi…

> free speech and avoiding censorship are not just legal rights, they are principles that ought to be defended. those who would argue for a world where the de facto standard is censorship because they are capable of a narrow legalistic interpretation of freedoms are hideously short-sighted. if you endorse the erosion of these principles in the venues where you are strong, your enemies will use your exact arguments to erode them where you are weak.

Although I agree with your general sentiment, I think you're being a bit bullish. It's important to understand what, exactly, we mean by "free speech". John Stewart Mill's On Liberty is the starting point for any such discussion.

In the essay, he discusses "freedom of thought" in this very famous paragraph:

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

The idea of freedom of speech isn't simply that "anything goes." In fact, the Supreme Court has upheld this position many (many) times: see Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire for the canonical example. Preventing shitposting on 4chan or on Yik Yak is not (I repeat: NOT) an infringement of free speech. There are no veritable opinions there. There is nothing that deserves the invokation of Mill's freedom of thought. In other words, there is nothing of value.

Note that this distinction contrasts with something like Bill O'Reilly's The Factor or your annoyingly conservative grandfather, whom you may disagree with, but who also might have some insight.

But there are some things which we've resolved: we know that Nazis had it wrong, we know that racism is immoral, we know that we landed on the Moon. So not giving a platform to anti-Semites, racists, or flat-Earthers is not an infringement of free thought, as Mill described it.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#114

Post by rdlecler1 »

A problem Yik Yak had was that it was primarily a university level product and because of the proximity features they had to restart their network growth after each vacation. Tying Location with some kind of organization or have a decay function for location based on time spent in that location could have perhaps fixed the issue.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#115

Post by majormajor »

ams6110 wrote: post #63
pitaa wrote: post #59

>two feminist groups and several former students filed a federal complaint accusing the University of Mary Washington...of failing to protect the female plaintiffs from cyber harassment... I am confused as to why anyone thinks its the University's duty to protect their students from "cyber harassment." I mean, I am aware of Title IX and all, I am just shocked at the amount of control, influence, and involvement into…

Sadly it's what the parents today (who pay the tuition) are demanding. Hence "unique snowflakes" and "helicopter parents." Add to that a healthy dose of media sensationalism to a degree that never used to happen. Everything is drama, crisis, outrage, injustice.

Today? Old news. Decades ago, I grew up in a private Christian school with specially-oriented textbooks (e.g. "Biology for Christian Schools") to avoid exposing kids to information the parents didn't like. Heck, so did my dad (though his was less extreme than mine - more recently, when he discovered more of what the one he'd picked for me actually taught, he apologized... whoops).

Hell, what do you think white parents moving out of integrating school districts to keep their kids away from black students was about? Same damn thing.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#116

Post by [deleted] »

ams6110 wrote: post #63
pitaa wrote: post #59

>two feminist groups and several former students filed a federal complaint accusing the University of Mary Washington...of failing to protect the female plaintiffs from cyber harassment... I am confused as to why anyone thinks its the University's duty to protect their students from "cyber harassment." I mean, I am aware of Title IX and all, I am just shocked at the amount of control, influence, and involvement into…

Sadly it's what the parents today (who pay the tuition) are demanding. Hence "unique snowflakes" and "helicopter parents." Add to that a healthy dose of media sensationalism to a degree that never used to happen. Everything is drama, crisis, outrage, injustice.

[deleted]

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#117

Post by Danihan »

quotemstr wrote: post #44

I'm a big believer in fully anonymous communication. Unfortunately, we live in a censorious age. Those who enable anonymous communication frequently become the targets of legal and social pressure exerted by angry mobs, mobs mostly composed of people who aren't even trying to communicate anonymously. Yik Yak fell in part because, instead of listening to their users, they listened to people who weren't their users. Th…

How exactly does one achieve anonymous development in the walled garden of any of the app stores? Genuinely curious.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#119

Post by gotothedoctor »

nyolfen wrote: post #106
gotothedoctor wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for saying this. Threads like this baffle me, make me sad and wonder if its time to just stop visiting this site. If you don’t mind being bullied, harassed, or threatened, that’s great, but it harms people. Whether you think it should or shouldn’t is irrelevant. Personally I don’t know anyone who has experienced it that wasn’t harmed. YikYak specifically was also horrific for Professors. (& of course, it also…

>Please don’t @ me about free speech or censorship; not only is it irrelevant to startups because they are businesses & not the government, but moderation & boundaries are what make communities endure. "don't @ me" about completely relevant challenges to your opinion that are based on axiomatic political principles is cowardly and foolish. free speech and avoiding censorship are not just legal rights, they are princi…

To be clear: I support free speech and oppose censorship by government. I don't know how or why one would want to enforce these principles on businesses--let alone how it would not run contrary to the most basic principles of private property & capitalism.

I said don't @ me because I've been in this conversation before & recognize there's little point in arguing when we are clearly defining the concept of free speech very differently.

Maybe I'm missing something, but weren't the majority of targets of harassment on YikYak as I described? Is it not ok to recognize this? Why? If we don't, it won't change.

Its ok that we disagree obviously, but I can't help but note that we are doing so on a privately owned platform that moderates its comments. Maybe you would, but I certainly wouldn't be here otherwise. Which maybe you'd also prefer:)

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#120

Post by joonoro »

_m8fo wrote: post #20
qmarchi wrote: post #16

Honestly, I don't get all the complaining from harassment. We live in a digital age where we can control a large amount of our information stream. If we don't like something, we just turn off the stream. It's like left-wing advocates and Fox. They don't like it, so they don't watch it. If you don't like what people are posting on some service, remove the service, inform people you know that you don't care about what'…

[flagged]

>Go on living, stop being a hyper-sensitive prick about people saying mean things. They're going to bully whether or not it's at home, school or work.

Go ahead and tell that to the growing number of people with depression or other mental anxieties that they're being "hyper-sensitive pricks", I'll wait. I'm sure they will appreciate your advice. This is just as stupid as telling a depressed person to "just think happy thoughts". You're out of touch.

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