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The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

nytimes.com

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Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#41

Post by tolien »

mgkimsal wrote: post #35
_m8fo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

some people don't want to live in a world where that sort of aggressive behaviour goes unchecked. whether it affects you or not personally, it's still a negative effect that we can look to minimize. "bullying" takes on many forms, and while I tend to think that just words alone may not necessarily cause harm, I've seen it escalate to physical violence enough that it makes me want to nip it in the bud earlier rather t…

Considering it's almost word-for-word the OP with s/harassment/bullying/, it's probably fair to say the GP is making a point about this "just don't listen" line we keep hearing w.r.t online harassment.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#42

Post by SimbaOnSteroids »

jjar wrote: post #40

This article seems to miss the point of why Yik Yak really failed. It didn't fail because of bullying, or bad publicity - That doesn't discourage users from using the app unless they're the ones targeted. The app failed because of the ham fisted attempts to control the userbase and remove a problem that did not affect the vast, vast majority of the userbase by introducing the "Handles" feature, and then later making…

A major issue I had with yik yak was that it really didn't work if you were going to a commuter school or lived in the suburbs then the local list was dead.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#43

Post by brudgers »

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'…

Ralph Koster's experience with online communities has informed his views. They are sophisticated because the problem is messy: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024060/Still-Logged-In-What-AR I look at online communities differently.

The problem from Koster's perspective is that when the target of harrassment/abuse/etc. turns off the source feed the feed still goes into the target's community. The communications analogy is not hanging up the telephone. The harrasement/abuse/etc. is delivered in public. Even if the target does not see it, the target's community does.

Perhaps an analogy is that one afternoon all of the target's neighbors opened their mailbox to find a flier falsely asserting that the target was a child molester. Most of the intended effect stems from the target's neighbors reading the flier. It doesn't matter much if the target read it. And in conversations with neighbors, "no I did not read it" does not make it better...and the fact that there are conversations with neighbors means that not reading the flier is not a way of avoiding the harassment/abuse/etc.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#44

Post by quotemstr »

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.

The next Yik Yak needs to be fully decentralized --- with anonymous development, so there's nobody to sue --- and with a network architecture that resists technical blocking attempts. The next Yik Yak needs to treat censors as adversaries, not partners. Only this approach can bring anonymous communication to its full potential.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#45

Post by urbanj »

DanBC wrote: post #33
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'…

> But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm missing something Post your name and address here, and give me 72 hours to show you what the harassment being complained about is like.

I wonder why he / she won't do that.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#46

Post by eropple »

Alex3917 wrote: post #28
simonw wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also need to pay for staff to handle customer and legal complaints. That ain't cheap.

Maybe in addition to having your users indemnify you for their UGC in the TOS, you could have users agree to pay you 25k every time they posted something like a bomb threat, rape threat, drug deal, etc.

That would be wholly unenforceable.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#47

Post by afarrell »

neolefty wrote: post #10

The article makes the case (to me) that local + anonymous was a failed experiment. In real-life communities, local means not anonymous, and bad behavior -- which is rare whether anonymous or not -- can be tied to an individual right away. The problem is that nasty, anonymous, and local is a terrible combination: > That hyper-localization is also what made the cases of harassment particularly galling. Ms. Musick, one…

Zephyr, the first IP-based IM system, briefly experimented with anonymity. It was similarly local--mostly being on the MIT campus (links to CMU zephyr being rare). I've not seen a historical record of the messages posted, but I've been told by multiple grey-haired alums that things turned toxic very quickly.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#48

Post by mirimir »

throwaway9980 wrote: post #36
mirimir wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I'm sure that people are saying all sorts of bad things about Mirimir. And about my other personas. And about my meatspace identity. But I don't go out of my way to read that stuff. Any more than I go out of my way to read media that seems stupid. However, I do get the concern about anonymous online mobs. If you're targeted heavily online, it's possible that someone will act out violently. Like that guy who sho…

Just last night I saw a message scrawled on a bathroom wall that said, "for a good time, call Mirimir." Don't know if that's good or bad from your perspective, but I chuckled at the old school hyperlocal anonymity of it.

Sure it wasn't Miri Mir?

She's hotter than I am :)

https://twitter.com/miricarro?lang=en

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#50

Post by OliverJones »

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'…

If consenting adults were the users, I'd agree with you.

But, in my town, this Yik Yak was used by high school, and some older middle school, students to trashtalk each other, both in particular and in general.

In my view it would be a good thing if parents of teens stopped footing the bill for the addictive devices that deliver services like Yik Yak and Instagram for that matter. For one thing, they'd save a bundle. For another, we as a community would have less cybersafety to worry about.

Good riddance to yik yak and the fratboy w##kers that created it.

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