Yik Yak App Reviews

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Major Bullying and Hate Speech Issues. We all know why YikYak was originally taken down. Yes, they do have systems in place to try to prevent this. In my herd, anyone that speaks out is threatened to have their identity revealed. Multiple people have been bullied off the app because a few people didn’t like their non-offensive content. A common issue in my herd is downvoting anyone that speaks out against frats, especially accusations of misconduct. We also have an issue where users are using the platform to spread discrimination. Another person was heavily bullied for being disabled and for having a chronic illness. This app is the same as it used to be. Reporting a post or comment does nothing. Hate continues to grow on this app. All of the issues I have mentions have no consequences. I do not recommend this app and hope to see more steps taken to combat these issues, as they happen everywhere.

Great concept, poor implementation. I’ve been using YikYak for the first time over the last week and I’m in love with the idea of an anonymous Twitter for your home town. However this app has several things holding it back from being more enjoyable. First and foremost is that the app runs very poorly. The app is slow, sometimes completely unresponsive, loads yaks and info about them 30 seconds when you’ve already seen them, and has a myriad of other performance issues. And that’s just my complaints about app performance. It’s marketing is also lackluster, especially regarding their official TikTok account of which I found out about the app and it’s return. It’s TikTok account is so bad and so unfunny it’s how bad the app seemed that made me curious and wanted to download it. But it’s probably good that their marketing team isn’t very good because I don’t think the app could handle a large influx of more uses for reasons previously mentioned. The app’s aesthetics and animations are fine, nothing to write home about. I want to see this app do well and become a part of my social media circuit but it obviously needs the funding for the app fixes first and then to hire a new marketing team next.

New update is terrible. The new update tried to make Yik yak like Reddit. Yik yak used to be able to let you see anonymous posts in a 5 mile radius, but now you have to be connected with your college. The thing I hate the most about this update is the chat board which is nation wide. It is just filled with horny people and people have posted nudes there. I miss when yak was only local and the range was a 5 mile radius. Now I can’t even access other popular yak locations using one of the previous updates features the space ship and I haven’t tried yet but because you choose your college I don’t know if I’ll be able to see local yaks when I move to a different area. Many people deleted the app after the update and honestly isn’t worth it anymore. Would rather use Reddit for the same features but more. Yik yak had a great thing going on but in my opinion they destroyed it. RIP

I shouldn’t be scared to use this app. I loved YikYak before the major update last week. I loved being able to make posts in my area and see what’s going on in my campus’s community. However, the new update is extremely confusing. You only have to be a college student to use it, but you can see posts all over the nation, so that doesn’t make sense. Also, the main reason I’m leaving this review is the Chatboard. Every time I look at the Chatboard, it’s filled with people being extremely inappropriate. I’ve seen many stranger’s privates posted on there. Yes, there’s an option to report and block the user who posted them, but people posting that horrific stuff shouldn’t be there on the first place. I miss when YikYak was a nice, safe app to use before the update. Now, every time I open the app, I’m met with an onslaught of pictures of people’s bodies. It’s disgusting and made me delete the app.

what have you done. trying not to swear in this review because im not sure if i can but holy cow you all really screwed the pooch on this one. the new UI is stressing me out along with most of the people i come across on the app now. my post history is gone which is heartbreaking because i loved looking back at my greatest hits on the app and now i’ll never see them again. not to mention that the original user base is dwindling because of this and i feel more out of touch with my herd than i ever have been. many of the people i’ve met through the app are no longer reachable because they have androids and don’t have access to the new update??? and even the notice before the update about dms getting erased was too short notice that i couldn’t properly exchange info with anyone i wanted to keep talking to. this new update has made me feel more alienated and stressed out on this app than i ever have before, and that’s saying a lot for someone who’s been using yikyak in a college town. to quote the most popular post in my herd right now, “i think this new update has cured my yikyak addiction”. i think i’m going to go outside and finally touch some grass, feel the wind in my hair, perhaps take a look at my surroundings for once. literally anything else that gets me to stop thinking about this godforsaken update.

Was better before. I got this app in fall 2022, when it was still location based. It was really fun, and I felt so connected to my community. Granted, I’m on a college campus, so my college community now is pretty much what the location thing used to be. But it was fun to look at Yik yak while traveling to see what other people were saying from different areas. Anyway, it’s just overwhelmed now with how many communities there are. There is zero moderation of the creation of communities, as people can just MAKE them. There are even repeats. It’s basically worse Reddit now. Oh yeah, there used to be a feature where you had an emoji and color, and now that the feature is gone it’s so sad. You could develop a reputation while still being anonymous, and while the emojis still exist, it’s now the default to have them off, and that’s just really sad :( Before, this app had a point to it. A very specific scratch to a very specific itch that I didn’t realize I had, and maybe the same for a lot of people. But now the location feature is gone, just completely gone, and YikYak is a weird mix of Twitter and Reddit. What even is the point anymore, if you could just use those apps? I still use this app because I feel connected to my college campus, and a couple of the communities are interesting. But overall, it was better before. Before, it was about connecting with your *literal* community, but now it’s about sucking you in and trying to take as much of your attention as possible.

Started off so fun…. The update. That stupid update. It screwed with what we could post, became this cesspool of either people getting banned for absolutely no reason or people posting stuff that aligned with the developers / moderators political views. They have removed vital features like verifying an email and this has made it so for the bad characters, they can VERY easily make a new account, and immediately start posting horrible stuff again. The Devs have also doubled down on a broken feature that used to be very fun in. Nearby. Nearby was a community that was the 5 mile radius of where you currently are. Best feature. Aaaaand they broke it in the new app, and after I emailed them about it, they doubled down on it and just removed the feature all together. To sum it up, the moderators and developers are horrible people and have extremely ruined this one decent app.

Bring back YikYak. As much as I hate the new update there is so much more to be upset at than a merger. 90% of posts on the chat board are nudes and other disgusting things. It’s not that hard for a kid to get on this app and see all of that. It asks you to confirm your age. But it’s not like you can’t just set it as older. I got called out by name and still haven’t figured out who it was. They told me to answer my texts and found out the only two people that know me here and have my number didn’t post it. People have gotten doxxed. It’s terrifying. I live in my college town. I’m a resident here. There’s so much bullying and hate speech. I honestly prefer when it was just local. I haven’t seen a single person who likes the update. I like the polls and I like talking to people nationwide. But seeing everyone’s junk when I know there are minors on the app. It’s gross.

Great App, Great Improvements. This app is great and is exactly what it says it is. Lots of people leaving low reviews are reviewing the people on the app rather than the app itself. Considering how quickly they update and patch things, it’s clear the team is working hard to make sure this app is good. They even listen to our advice with things such as adding the ability to upload things from our camera roll. So thank you to the Yik Yak team for creating an app and constantly improving said app to ensure we are all having a good time using it. If you’re feeling upset that the app is full or drags and people wanting to get drunk, consider the environment you’re living in and how you can change that rather than expecting people from an HQ in Nashville to do so.

Illegal and Propaganda-esque Practices. Shouldn’t even get one star, working on reporting to BBB for the illegal practices. This app breaks their own “Community Guiderails”, which were legally mandated after the original Yik Yak crashed and burned. They routinely take down posts and freeze accounts from posting because they disagree with campus administrators, while leaving up posts that their own page says they HAVE to take down because they condone illegal activities. One of the top posts on my campus is promoting a party with underage drinking and illegal drugs on a dry campus, that has been reported for being illegal by 5 different people and yet has stayed up for more than a week, but a post complaining about the ruin of an award program on campus that didn’t identify anyone and was just stating facts was taken down, the poster being put in a timeout (we’re adults, what’s even up with putting adults in timeout, anyways?!) for more than a day for breaking rules that don’t exist.

Making Cyberbullying Easy. (Context: College experience with this app) This app has ruins several of my close friends mental health. This is due to individuals commenting on their life events with no understanding of what’s actually happening. All people due on this app is slander and beat down each other because they are behind a screen and anonymous. This app literally paved the way for cyberbullying. Yes, you can report the message and get them removed but not before half your area sees it and takes a screenshot. We as people need to stop tearing each other down for their mistakes. We are all human! I’m sure you have mistakes you don’t want to be publicly slandered for. All in all, if you want to maintain a positive self esteem don’t download this app at college. P.S. it is not entertaining to slander and degrade someone. So stop promoting the defamation of peoples character who are just like you and me.

Yik yak is hypocritical. Yik Yak banned me after defending a friend who was being bullied ON yik yak. None of the people using discriminatory or vulgar language were banned, but when I said “people keep saying ‘Sarah’ stalked ‘Ben’ people also are saying ‘be ‘ stalked ‘Sarah’ can we let them figure that out themselves and the rest of you leave them alone” I got banned and had my posts removed. If defending victims can get me banned, why isn’t yik yak banning the people bullying and harassing those people? It is even against yik yak guidelines to bully or harass any being or third-party person, especially exposing them on an anonymous app. Yet, I got banned, while NOT violating yik yak guidelines. My guess, is people reported my posts because they wanted to continue the bullying and harassment towards those individuals. It is morally and ethically wrong to allow bullying and harassment, especially when it is against the guidelines, but to ban someone who is following guidelines, and trying to stop that reoccurring harassment. Don’t download this app, it’s filled with toxic drama and is not worth it. Yik yak won’t even follow their own guidelines. Fun fact, in 2017, yik yak was shut down for this same reason, and now it is back up and reoccurring for the same issues it was shut down for in the first place.

I miss the old YikYak!. I really wanted to like YikYak again. It was great in college. But now it’s just littered with high schoolers who post stupid stuff and spam the local thread. It definitely depends on your area. I’m also near an airport so it’s either people complaining about flights, being perverted, or high schoolers acting stupid. Plus the new community guide rails are odd. I totally get removing hateful content, but all kinds of stuff gets removed. Just not as fun anymore :/. Maybe after I move I’ll try it again! It would also be nice to be able to explore yaks around the world! I noticed you could explore on a map but it wouldn’t generate any yaks from that area for me.

We need a way to dispute post/comment removal. I sometimes have posts/comments removed that do not reveal any identifying information. In fact, I had a comment removed for saying that one of OP’s comments made it super obvious who they were. I never stated any names. Meanwhile people get to drop initials and outright mention people, and those things never get removed? There needs to be a way for us to appeal mod decisions. Other notes: the app is super buggy. It’s difficult to leave your own comment on a post instead of replying to someone else’s. You have to exit out of the post, then go back in and start typing without touching anything else first. Also, if you “violate” the guardrails (in my case, I didn’t) it makes you agree to them again over and over rather than just once. Can’t tell if that one’s a bug or an intentional choice.

Beyond entertaining, and bugs are being fixed. I never got the chance to use Yik Yak when it was first popular, so when it came back I downloaded it on the first day. It’s just as engaging to talk with those around you anonymously as I expected, and I haven’t even tested it in a dense area or college campus yet. I cannot stress enough that yik yak is an incredible concept. There was a huge lag problem in the first few days but devs have taken the failure rate down from 90% to like 40%. I’m gonna add a star to my review each time the UX gets better. It’s clear that the devs are doing their best to fix this, and I know it must be devastating to be crippled by, of all things, too high demand. I can tel this app is getting the backend care it needs, and it’ll just get better from here.

Mute words feature please. I like yikyak and I think it’s fun when you live in a college town, because then you can talk to your peers on campus. The one issue though is that a lot of users are in fraternities and sororities and they leave a lot of annoying posts related to that. So to make the app more usable for me I started blocking people who made posts related to Greek life. It was wonderful. I stopped seeing the frat posts that others would complain about. Until today when I was doing my thing I got the fatal and devastating message that I had already blocked the maximum number of people. I would love if yikyak would add the mute words feature that twitter has. Then instead of blocking individuals I could stop seeing the words “ksig”, “beta”, “pi”, “delta”, “pike”, etc. which would be A LOT more effective at filtering out the content I and many others are not interested in seeing.

New Update Is Trash.. Yik Yak quickly became the main online presence at my college. My college is rather small and basically everyone had yik yak. It was the place to go if you wanted to meet people, talk about anything, get reviewes of the food, homework help and so much more. The anonymity on the app allowed for it to be a place where anyone regardless of cognitive bias, background, friend group or school to get together and chat. The app’s simple concept and design is what brought most of the appeal. None of the unnecessary features of other social media. This new update removed around half of the user base and felt more like a copycat of other social media. We now have too many features, a design that is far too intimidating and no rocketship. Yik Yal now feels like it changed to fit the corporate status quo that other social media follow. I understand bullying was a big issue on the app but it did not warrant such changes. Yik Yak used to be a simple app for anonymously chatting to people in a 5 mile radius but now it is a corporate shell of its formal self. I really hope you guys can restore the magic of this app.

A Continuous Disappointment. They continuously make the app worse and worse and worse. Don’t fix something that isn’t broken! From removing the most adored features to changing the UI to be less user friends and more hideous, to random timeouts/bans for something that doesn’t even come close to breaking the guidelines with no way to appeal a timeout, it seems they can’t make a single correct decision when it comes to the direction of this app. I had the app way back when it first came out, when it was taken away, years later brought back, then made into a sidechat duplicate. I have thousands and thousands of yakarma. But I just can’t get down with this app anymore. Please for the love of god or whatever you believe in, stop making the most annoying, frustrating, ugly changes to the app update after update. Goodbye for a a year or so, maybe they’ll have figured it out by then…

Great, just needs technical work.. I had no idea about Yik yak until the week it was brought back, but it’s pretty neat being on a college campus. I have not seen the bullying which it seems to have been previously known for, and it’s fun to get a sense of what the community is feeling, along with just funny posts. However, in my first week of using it, 2/3 of the time it would say there were no posts in the area, even sitting in the exact same spot, and would often not load all of them at once. Now the first issue is resolved, but it sometimes takes a couple tries of opening and closing the app or refreshing and waiting to get posts from further back to load. I understand that there are probably 100 other posts saying this exact thing, but I enjoy this app a lot and would hate to see its momentum stopped by technical issues.

Needs Work. This app has been comical, informative, fun and engaging when it works. There’s a solid 10-20% of the time where I am constantly refreshing hoping for posts to load. Where the app will state that there are no posts. Despite seeing hundreds seconds prior. Notifications are buggy, comments take forever to load, I’ve seen “-1 comments” on a post. Which doesn’t make sense. Sometimes I will post, and it never displays on the feed. But the worst is having a post with a large number of comments, and having to scroll all the way to the bottom just to see the most recent comment. To see if there was any new comment, you have to go to the buggy notification page, refresh, click the notification, scroll all the way to the bottom, wait for it to load, scroll more and the comment is finally displayed. Recently if I comment on a post, it’ll state “comment posted, scroll to the bottom to view” and I’ll be the only comment, there nowhere to scroll down to and yet my comment still isn’t displayed. The app crashes consistently. Outages often for long periods of time, ranging from 30 mins to a few hours. When it works, it’s enjoyable. But there are large amounts of time where it doesn’t work. It’s hard to keep track of conversations. I am just hopeful these issues are addressed to make this a top tier app.

I would give yikyak’s update no stars, but that’s not possible, so I give you, a 1.. If it was possible to give no stars, I would. The FORCED update is not user friendly at all and looks like we went back in time to 2008. It is TERRIBLE to look at. Truly appalling. Everyone is going back on yikyak to see the update, but the activity will PLUMMET. It’s trying waaaay too hard to be Reddit. All your old yikyaks are completely gone, missing, and you’ll never read your funny yikyak posts and reminisce ever again. Super disappointed. All yikyak users want the old layout back. It was so sleek and calming now I’m bombarded with blocks and rectangles outlined in the color red. Absolutely appalling. Whoever decided this layout design was okay to pass, should be FIRED. Idc if it’s the CEO, or whatever, your decision sucked. Do better yikyak. Bring the old layout back. Bring our old yikyaks back.

They removed the entire point of the app.. Social media has a major issue: it's impersonal. And I don't personally think that anonymity is entirely to blame. The fact that people could be from anywhere, and there are millions of people on most social media sites makes it incredibly dehumanizing. If you want yer dopamine hit, you have to appeal to the lowest common denominator or your post will die unseen. YikYak fixed that! It was inherently personal: if something happened near you, everyone could talk about it. The limited user base for any given area meant you got to know the regulars, and a culture could develop. You as an individual contributed to your local scene. That has been completely deleted. Now there are only generalized subject-based groups which span, as far as I can tell, the entire US. You can’t even see how far away anyone is. Not three days ago, I met a stranger and made an irl friend off yikyak. Now I’ve got a better chance with a sandwich board and a megaphone. The app’s identity is dead and it does not have long before the corpse gets cold.

Would be a great app if people were good people.. This is a cool idea. Unfortunately it’s predicated on the idea that people are good people. While many are, there are always going to be people that aren’t. This is the perfect app for such people because it provides no way to hold anyone accountable for what they say. In my time at college I’ve seen multiple instances of severe cyber bullying and emotional abuse. None were taken down by the apps “bullying” filters. This includes girls name dropping guys and labeling them as “stalkerish” or “predatory.” Effectively ruining those guys reputations just because they didn’t like them. Guys name dropping girls and sl*t shaming them. People joking about killing themselves. People making fun of those with disabilities. People heavily sexualizing student athletes. People making death threats or doxxing others. People being racist and more. While I love the idea, the fact that you have no way to verify whether those who use your app are good people makes it impossible to maintain without enabling bad people to do terrible things.

App is clunky and most users are disgusting people. I did not use yikyak back in the day when it was popular. But I picked it up this time to see what all the fuss was about. Anonymous social networking? Sounds interesting. But does it really work? It depends on what you’re looking for. If you want a shallow discussion that doesn’t really lead to anything other than general disgust and frustration with the people who live 5 miles around you, this is the place to go. You really get to see just how dysfunctional everybody is from their messages. I deleted it off of my phone today because I just couldn’t take it anymore. Every time I went on the app I left feeling worse than when I went into it. Not a good thing. Would not recommend. Plus there’s no way to share anything other than text. It’s like they cut the legs off of social networking to see if it would function, and I guess it does, but why would you want to use this?

Convinced they’re trying to kill it to try to gain users on another app. New update loves- anonymous commenting, gifs, and polls. Bad update bad- basically turned into Reddit I hardly use Reddit and I don’t want a second one. The stream of consciousness of everyone nearby was what made it fun. Now you have to go to ur subreddit school, AITA etc. you can no longer copy comments. It was a fun way to create a stream of comments and just adjust it slightly. Also if you’re going to remove the distance then remove blocks!!! I have a stalker who literally just blocks and unblocks me to see if I post anonymously and then proceeds to harass me. I know I can report them but I’d rather keep tabs on their craziness. So maybe just remove the blocks otherwise removing radius is mute point. I like the idea of groups but miss the world wide featured college posts. Posting the apps own gifs and getting a timed ban is ridiculous. I got flagged for not saying anything but posting a picture of the apps own gif 💀 so does that mean yy is flagged like what?

Rough around the edges. Can make a comeback and still has its charm but the success totally depends on people start using the app in any given area. No point in using this anywhere that isn’t a city or high density area. There is also no way to contest a ban as far as I can tell but what make it worse is that you don’t get a warning. I made an obviously sarcastic oregano joke and was banned but someone who posts about there being an “orgy” nearby was not (the post has been up for a long time). Its frustrating to say the least that there is no warning and then no communication to try and appeal. You can get around a ban by using apps that give you temporary phone number but I figured I’d write this review and not use the app on principle.

In Defense of Simplicity. YikYak was fun because you could only post locally. If I wanted whatever is going on since this most recent update, I’d go on 4chan (and no one wants to go on 4chan). As someone who goes to a small college which was heavily impacted by COVID, YikYak has become a weirdly important aspect of campus life. It helps with community building and cultural understand not only on campus, but in creating connections with people who live in our college town. This new update not only mitigates that by separating local yaks with “college specific” yaks, it’s also visually unpleasant and difficult to use. The text only medium of old meant that people had to be creative, or take pictures, and it made it feel fun and simple when so much social media now feels cluttered and overwhelming. This update has destroyed everything that was unique about YikYak— everything people liked about it. Sometimes, things are better when they’re simple. Please bring back the old YikYak.

Update is Horrendous. Was really starting to enjoy this app before the mandatory update today. I had to input an age before being able to use it, which is both useless at stopping children from accessing it and annoying to adults using it. They also updated the UI to look as much like a bad twitter as they could, and generally made the whole system feel more clunky and less appealing. I would’ve recommended this yesterday, but today I will not. Yik Yak developers, if you’re reading this, I sincerely hope you can change the UI back. I understand you put a lot of effort into making the new one, but please don’t sunk cost fallacy this. The new polls item is admittedly fantastic, but automatically seeing gifs takes up way too much space, and reduces actual communication between people, which is why we’re here.

Fantastic but the Notification Tab Needs Work. I love checking this app and engaging with my fellow people on campus, but the app really needs to update its notification tab to show more of a preview of what Yak it’s referring to. The notification of “someone else commented on a yak you commented on” is helpful, and I want to check in on the thread, I love that. But, it doesn’t tell me which Yak that is. I have to tap that notification, wait 10 seconds for the Yak to load and then I end up checking the responses on that entire Yak. Right after that, you turn around and go back to the notification tab, and the indicator light for the notification you left is still on. You might be thinking, “Oh, just refresh it!”. Nope, if you do that, it gets rid of all the indicator lights for new notifications. So now, you have to guess what the next notification you should check is with no help from the exactly the same notification descriptions. I would suggest having a feature that changes the notifications from individual updates on each new message in the thread, to instead being one that says “New comments on Yak, ‘XYZ’” standing for the first couple words of that Yak. This way, it’s labeled and it’s streamlined because in the old system, I was getting all the updated messages in a Yak from just clicking on the first notification but then I still had to wade through all the other notifications about the same Yak.

Who thought this was a good idea?. This app is a gateway for bullying. Yes, theoretically it is a fun way to anonymously connect with people around you, but the creators neglected to think about their target audience. Yik Yak is literally being broadcast to insecure teenagers who feel better about themselves only when they are tearing down another person. This app truly makes everyone lose their humanity because they know they’re safe behind the “anonymous” tag. In only 10 minutes of scrolling through to see why my school is making such a fuss over this app I’ve seen death threats, talks of wishing to commit suicide, hate speech, vulgar slang, school shooting threats, people being sexualized by name, and so so so much more. This is not an app that should be allowed on the app store. If it had people actively moderating messages and posts, it MIGHT take a step in the direction of being remotely human again, but this simply isn’t possible. If you value yourself at all, do yourself a favor and don’t download this app. It is a horrible horrible space and there are so many more healthy groups that you could enjoy instead. Ignorance is bliss, it isn’t worth stumbling upon your name and being absolutely crushed. Stay safe out there.

End merge with Sidechat. YikYak and Sidechat were perfectly fine apps separate from each other and each served their own purposes, with Sidechat being for college students and YikYak being more community focused. This merge of the two apps into one serves zero purpose whatsoever. They were not the same apps to begin with and each had their own unique in-app features, but now basically all of these features have been stripped away. YikYak is entirely unrecognizable now and all previous user karma and history has been wiped. Sidechat is now overrun by people who were former YikYak users and are now being forced to post on Sidechat forums and streams. This merge is honestly beyond ridiculous and I’m surprised anyone at Sidechat actually thought that completely taking over another, (much older and well-established) beloved app and ridding it of all of its defining features and merging it with Sidechat was even a remotely good idea. Everyone on each app is posting on the same streams now and everyone is confused and frustrated trying to use the new versions of each of these apps. The only way to solve this problem without tanking the ratings and reputations of both of these apps is to return them to their previous states.

Simply an anon bullying platform. This app has come to light again after it was used while I was in high school and coming back when I’m in college. In both places this app just creates a platform for people to bully others, defame others, and say anything they can to get their “yakarma “ up. People I know have had serious accusations made against them and all of them are completely false. And individuals solely care about using this for bullying. If you say anything about how poor of an app it is or how it induces bullying, your message is reported for violating guidelines. It should continue to be reported because it’s endorsing people to say whatever they feel about others without consequences and without a name or identity to stand behind. This app just ruins peoples reputations and makes them feel worse about themselves every day they look at it. I’ve even seen someone post fake news about running over a friends cat. This app is horrible.

Update is godawful. I am so upset by the new update. Yik yak was very good as it was because it fit in its own niche that no other app could fill. People could voice their thoughts and opinions anonymously that other people could read. Now the main purpose of this app is going to be drowned out by pictures, memes, and polls. This new update has made it just like almost any other form of social media. Everyone can share memes and images with people on Instagram, Snapchat Facebook, or Reddit. The only difference now is that this app is anonymous. If the developers are just going to make this app like any other, why wouldn’t I just use another form of social media that is a lot better established with features that have been around for a lot longer? People appreciate uniqueness, and updating Yik yak to a form that makes it almost indistinguishable at a glance from any other form of social media means that people won’t even give it a second one.

App doesn’t open anymore. Still no DARK MODE. When opening the app, it just shows the blank loading page forever and ever and never loads any yaks. This be problem isn’t new and could usually be solved by force-quitting a couple times and then trying again, but after the recent update that “solution” doesn’t work anymore and now it just loads the blank white screen with no yaks and no yakarma until the app eventually crashes and closes by itself. Also, please allow users to switch to a dark mode for nighttime. I made a Siri Shortcuts app automation to run “classic invert” screen when opening the Yik Yak app, and another automation to turn the inverted screen off when closing Yik Yak. But since there’s no way to disable annoying notifications for the Shortcuts app, it’s better to just have a dark mode built into the Yik Yak app like every other social media app does so users don’t have to rely on inverting the colors on their screen in order to not strain their eyes at night

Latest update has broken the app. I have no idea what the developers put in the most recent update but whatever it is it’s caused the app to become extremely glitchy. Usually at it’s worst after 9 at night. The most common glitch is that all yaks, DM’s, and notifications will sometimes disappear, and your yakarma will show as 0. This might persist for as little as a minute and as long as 20 minutes. Occasionally yaks will repeat as you scroll down or show as completely blank. DM’s will take more than a few minutes to show up as sent, and comment notifications will come minutes after seeing the actual comment appear on a yak you commented on. And of course there’s the random crashes that seem to happen with no rhyme or reason. My advice to the developers would be to roll back the app to a previous version (if that’s possible, I’m not well versed enough in iPhone apps to know if it is or not) until they have thoroughly tested and patched the updated version so these problems no longer persist.

The death of the best social app. I LOVED YikYak, it was absolute perfection two weeks ago. This update is atrocious in every way, shape, and form. It is hideous. Sickening. Everything about it is absolutely awful. I’ve never reviewed an app in my 23 years of life but when I returned to my herd after spring break and opened the app, what I saw sent me here to write an obituary for what was once one of the greatest social media apps ever created. There is not a single new feature that is beneficial or interesting. The beauty of YikYak was its simplicity, now it feels like I’m making a discussion board post—it is literally nauseating to look at. I cannot bring myself to continue using the app because of this. I am devastated. This has been the ultimate failure of mankind, I’m so devastated that I am going to email the YikYak team to ask them why they felt compelled to throw away years of work and reputation. This update is absolutely shameful, there is nothing to be proud of here. RIP the Yak; RIP my herd; RIP my faith in app development. YikYak was the last unicorn of GOOD social media apps, I thank her for the laughs we shared, the woes she validated, the sacred hours in which shame and decency no longer existed. She was taken too soon, may she rest in peace. Til Valhalla.

New update ruined user experience. I previously loved the YikYak app, but the latest update ruined the experience entirely. I am likely going to delete the app now. Here are my main complaints: 1. All of my old yaks are no longer accessible to me. I hate this because my yaks are like little reminders of my college memories so far. 2. The default feed is now the most popular yaks as opposed to the most recent. I don’t like this because yaks sharing information about events on campus, safety information (such as someone hearing gunshots), etc are no longer at the top by default. 3. The communities feature overcomplicates the experience. YikYak is trying to be something like nextdoor, and it will lose its relevance if it continues to do so. 4. The UI feels horribly cramped now. I can’t really pinpoint why, but it feels suffocating. I think it might be the darker color for the top bar? I will give YikYak credit for restricting the app to college students. I think that was a good decision. I’m not 100% convinced that my anonymity would be protected since we have to provide an email now, but that alone would not be a dealbreaker for me. I think that the concept of chat posts has potential as well, but overall, the update has degraded the app’s experience too much for me to continue using it.

Yak 🤮. I’ve never been fond of this app. They way people are in society today this app only fuels those poor intentions. People in my community are petty enough to lie on this app to spread rumors or false claims to a point where there are news articles written about it (and we’re in college not highschool). First of all a news station should never use an anonymous app as a source, but secondly this app fuels hatred especially since it allows its users to hide behind a screen. This app frustrates me so much and pains me to see people take pleasure in acting this way. If you really want to know what’s going on or talk to people, go hangout with them. Go outside experience the real stuff life has to offer instead of getting a dopamine fix about drama that’s probably not even true. I say all this with love, if you’re reading this please really consider my words.

Not as good as it used to be W/suggestions. Yik yak was way better before. I like the new design and all that. But the biggest issue I have is that my yaks/comments will get taken down for whatever reason and the app doesn’t show which ones or why. I would probably enjoy using this app more if I was able to pull up some kind of window that has all my yaks that I’ve sent out, and putting the “flagged for removal” notice next to the individual yak so that I know which post is no longer visible and I will have an idea of why. Also, I really don’t like how I get an individual notification for every comment I get. I want one notification per yak, similar to the way fb works. If I’m going through my notifications to see who commented or voted on what and I end up navigating to the same post three different times for three different notifications, it’s simply confusing, and a waste of time. If someone comments on my yak, and then someone else adds another comment, the most recent notification should overtake all previous notifications for that particular post. Overall, I just don’t like how difficult and confusing it can be go through the app.

Hate speech. This app is ridiculous. There is absolutely no monitoring or policing of the ridiculous amounts of hate speech on here. It’s left up to individual yakkers to take down racist, homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic posts. We’ve seen users saying multiple slurs, talking about killing all women, and saying disgustingly racist things but their posts will stay up despite the amount of reporting done. People will get banned for saying dumb jokes but the amount of harassment I’ve faced on here for my identity is absolutely unacceptable, especially since blocking users doesn’t prevent them from commenting on the same post. Do better, yikyak. I assumed the community guardrails are meant to protect against the kind of bullying that shut down the app in the first place, but it’s clear that the developers just wanna sell their silly little socks and don’t care about the kind of crap that marginalized groups have to deal with on their app.

It’s ok…but the people... I’m at a university so most users are uni age. The concept of the app is really neat. If there weren’t so many mean people. People being nasty to each just because they have the anonymity status. All of the parties that get planned is a little annoying to see. Friday and Saturday nights just become a flood of students wanting to get drunk which I guess isn’t abnormal. But it’s really annoying when it’s your neighbors right behind your wall blasting music until 4am every weekend. Someone even fell out their window. Then people telling those who complain about noise to grow up and get over the noise. Growing up would be not breaking your landlord’s lease. So that’s only 50% of the herd here. But the other 50% is pretty chill, laid back, students. There’s honestly a lot of bullying over gossip. Or people asking for head. Also I really don’t recommend this app for high schoolers and younger. There’s way more trolls and awful posts. It’s just mean. This app isn’t really that great for quiet students who want nothing to do with the Greek life or jocks

It’s okay but…. The app is okay and fun when it’s working how it SHOULD be. However, most of the time, especially on WiFi the app NEVER opens or states an error and I need to force close the app. However, while using cell data, the app opens fine. Like….????? Also, there’s really disgusting individual(s) on the platform in my area. I don’t know if they are true or trolling but it’s absolutely disgusting and the fact that I consistently report the post and the user hasn’t been banned yet is astounding. For example; said user/pedos are making statements such as “there’s nothing wrong being a MAPs (minor attracted person)”, “NAMBLA party at pride”, more than 4 times a week. It’s disgusting. The app was fun back then but now it isn’t. And YikYak needs to do something about those kinds of post rather than just removing them. Such as banning them or adding a report function for mentioned issue above.

Fun But Redundant. I love the idea of anonymity to the point where fun icons like everything from skateboards to cows are used w/ no names or profile info... Basically, this app is like Reddit without subs and profiles, but this doesn't come without error. YikYak allows you to block anyone, say, if a post offends you or whatever... But when you block them, they can still comment on your posts, which means you can still probably see their posts, even though I have seemingly found out Yikyak blocks comments of users you've blocked. Also, the down/upvote system is so dumb, I love Yikyak for the fact you can post just about anything in text... But how can you post when people at any given moment will downvote you 5 times and your post gets removed? I've had a decent amount of times where I've posted something that shouldn't offend anyone and my post gets taken down from downvotes. I guess if that's Yikyak's system then cool, but also very annoying. And while this isn't Yikyak's fault, trolls LIVE on this app, literally. I got called out for s*xual a**ault and I literally have never met anyone in person from this app. People can act so dumb on this app, so beware, its full of toxicity and ppl that might try to ruin your life.

Needs "reverse blocking" aka "hide from". I enjoy using YikYak and interacting with the local herd. There are a few features I wish it had to enhance content, such as image uploading and live links for posted URLs. But my main concern in this review is privacy and user behavior to each other. There are users who like to be bossy about kinds of content they want to see and will organize downvote-to-remove drives for Yaks they want to intimidate. Not talking about anything political, or personal, just not to their taste or idea of "What yikyak is for". Such as classic poetry or local weather reports. They will post their dislike, and if one responds with "Just block me please, you won't have to see this any more " they make it clear they just want to intimidate and mock and down vote. For :me: to block :them: does no good, they still see my yaks and can downvotes at will. What yakkers in my position really need is a "reverse block", which we can set and has the effects like they had blocked me -- they cannot see my yaks or comments and cannot vote on them. Thus it's like having a "hide me from this user" on the menu. Thanks for giving this a look!

What kind of business model are you running?. Did you all get clearance to work with the colleges in your area or did you just decide that it’s going to be a college specific app on your own? Colleges most likely won’t recommend your app and probably have their own community portals that they relay information through. Taking this away from everyone but college students is really dumb, and if that was your business tactic, you should have said so from the beginning instead of changing things around last second. Now even if you change it back, you won’t have as many people as you had before. I’m actually just deleting this app now and not even going to wait for you to make it public again. Great idea for an app, wrong developers to lead it with poor leadership and way too many wrong decisions.

This isn’t even YikYak anymore. YikYak/Sidechat has completely ruined this app. Their refusal to listen to their users and desperation for profit has led to this app being unusable and defeats its entire purpose. Restricting it to universities, only Apple users, and requiring more identifiable information to create an account alongside a terrible user-interface has removed everything that made this a special app. I am no longer able to gall with the people I knew on the old YikYak because they were using the spaceship feature and/or do not want to share personal information. There is an extremely limited ability to make connections with others, and the removal of old YikYak features and post/comment history means many users lost over a year’s worth of data. Forcing users into Sidechat (the exact same app, same posts and everything) with no warning and through the deceptive narrative of bringing back YikYak is a real slap in the face to the users who kept them running. Thanks for choosing profit over people, I hope the pay is worth ruining what you spent years trying to build. I do not recommend downloading this app at all, you’re better off just downloading the Reddit app.

So much potential but so many bugs. I remember using the app when it was first out and loved it. I'm so happy to see it's back, and excited to see where it goes, but right now it's not performing well. More than half the time when you open the app it says there are no yaks in your radius even when there definitely are. Even when it does show posts, it will take ages to respond to you scrolling or trying to open a post, often freezing or crashing in the process. Clicking on your notifications often won't even load the relevant post. Their auto-mod system will just pull down posts and comments with swear words in them and I have no idea if reporting an actually bad post does anything. The dev team seriously needs to work on this app before it's going to be functional for even the small number of users currently on it, much less when it starts to reach its previous popularity. I hope it can measure up.

Whoever is in charge of this app RUINED it.. I’ve never left a review on an app before, so this will be my first. I first got this app in high school because I had a really large school and thought it would be fun. This was when you could still interact with your local community rather than just college communities. Removing that feature was the start of this app’s downfall. It was funny to see everyone talking about teachers and what was going on around town. At some point I got a timeout for whatever reason. I never made rude comments on there or anything, so someone had to of reported one of my comments or something that caused the timeout. I didn’t understand and it never let me post anything else again, so I just deleted the app. I just re-installed it today because I’m in college now, and I wanted to join and post on the community. I joined the community and scrolled through a few comments. I then wrote up a post about our fall break that just started today. I tried to post it….and it told me I was in a timeout. A TIMEOUT FOR OVER 2 YEARS????? What sense does that make?! This app seriously downgraded, and it doesn’t seem like there will be any effort made to return it to its glory days. Unless you’re in college it’s a pointless app, and if you want to join a college community that actually functions normally just use Snapchat. I really, really, REALLY despise this company for ruining such a good app. Deleting it for the second time now and never downloading again.

What made YikYak YikYak is gone. The entire reason I wanted YikYak in the first place was to connect with my local community. YikYak used to be perfect for that, until a few weeks ago. You can no longer talk to your local community; there’s just universities and then the great beyond. I don’t need another place to make long-distance friends, that’s what Discord is for. I don’t need to divide the strangers I talk to by giant nationwide interest groups, that’s what Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr are for. What I need is my herd, and no one gave me my herd quite like YikYak used to. If YikYak is to meet the same soulless money-grubbing fate that every other platform inevitably faces these days, I hope the developers are at least aware that the changes they’ve implemented into YikYak have stripped it of all the things that made it unique and authentic. The features that made it meet and fulfill a unique and niche market demand have been replaced with sad knockoffs of other platforms. It’s okay to experiment with other options and ideas, but it’s frankly insulting to assume that we’d completely trade in our herds for that. Unless the developers change their mind on this decision, I will be spending my time on the other platforms that do everything new YikYak does, better. I’ll be missing my herd every step of the way.

Bullies roaming wild. Fun app to interact with others from the same school and those with similar interests. The option to block a user is useful especially if it’s a person who is antagonistic. However, if that person is blocked, they can still see your posts and comment on them. But you can’t see them on the actual post, only in notifications. If there were a feature where a blocked user couldn’t access your post at all, it would improve safety and peace in the community. As of right now, someone who was very hurtful on the app beforehand, is still able to comment on my posts and I can see what they post in the notifications. My problem is I can’t access the comment to report it for being hurtful/harmful or do anything about it. Please fix quickly!!

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The new update sucks. You got rid of the 5 Mile radius feature. And you can’t join without a school email, which a lot of the people in my herd were out of school for a few years. This was not a user friendly update. It didn’t need a change.

New update. This update sucks, my college isn’t even in it despite getting the email. Change it back

New and offended. Make it the way it used to be where you could say stuff on this app without getting suspended from it because your yak had a trigger word like “trans” or “grape drink” in literally any context

Questionable. I used to love Yikyak so I hopped on and immediately saw a bunch of rude spam comments on a top yak. I reported and downvoted those comments and now my app doesn’t show any content anymore, my yakarma is all gone too. Kinda disappointed so far Update: reporting and downvoting bullying got me banned😍🥰😜

sucks. can’t use it unless you’re a college student. no idea why they would make it like that

Changed the app completely with the college update. Yik yak was dying already and now it’s even worse since most people are graduated already

Yaking is my new favorite thing. Best app

should be available for everyone and use groups. Use groups to decide who’s in uni or college and who wants to be able to see all posts; be more proactive on the hide feature when people downvote posts by not showing them unless you choose to click them instead of needing to moderate. Would be an awesome anon community app otherwise, and is such a good idea that it should expand!!

can’t get on :(. my school email isn’t accepted by yik yak :(

App is now useless. Don’t bother.. Yak now requires you to verify your phone number, and your college or university email. After jumping through these hoops it tells me, we couldn’t find your school, and I’m completely unable to use the app after both verifications. Don’t waste your time with this app anymore. It was great many years ago.

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Why Fix Something that Wasn’t Broken. After the new update, everything is broken, unlike it’s previous version. It’s so much more disorganized (I’m getting Yaks from 45 minutes ago next to Yaks from 18 hours ago), it’s much more crowded with the ability to ‘retweet’ Yaks, use AI Art generators (which doesn’t even work for some of us), previous Yaks and likes from the previous version were all wiped and now it’s just difficult to get news about what’s going on at my campus from people on my campus, and more issues. The design is WAY too streamline and modern, which multiple Yakkers on my Campus have expressed distaste for. I’m very sad that the devs decided to build this app from the ground up when it was perfectly fine as is.

Trigger happy QA team. Wrote a sarcastic comment that was not insulting, not threatening, and not harmful to anyone or anything in any way yet it was removed because someone reported it and whoever removed it thought it’d be funny to haphazardly remove a bunch of my other posts in sequence prior to completely banning me in the span of minutes. Not sure what it was, I didn’t break any rules yet here we are. Aside from this circumstance the app is extremely buggy, unresponsive and needs to be closed out and re-opened at any point after being used a single time. Revising my previous review: this app is now for college students only. Good riddance. I wish I could go backwards in time and literally NEVER use this app in the entirety of my life. That’s how unbelievably akin to garbage that this software IS, and how I would STRONGLY RECOMMEND NEVER DOWNLOADING IT. EVER.

Discriminative and biased. The new update is terrible imo, they excluded the people that were not in college and blocked them from coming back in. I’m a graduating senior and I was using that app to make new friends from the college that I already got accepted in. I also was communicating with friends from the college and they were going to show me around and introduce me to new people from the college. Instead I’m left with no knowledge from this update, I can’t make friends because they blocked (us) out. The app was good before although it was glitchy. Tbh I think they should make it for people 18 and up and not for people in college only. Sorry Yikyak your Techs don’t know how to make an app that is non discriminative and a useful app.

rampant and dangerous misinformation. While this app is quick to automatically censor anything that it perceives to be offensive, what this app severely likes is any kind of enforcement mechanisms for dangerous misinformation. I keep seeing horribly untrue rumors about things like the Covid pandemic that go unchecked and have no ability to be reported. It is incredibly dangerous especially given the increasing prevalence of the disease. I’m very disappointed in the app developers at allowing this information to spread so dangerously with no ability for users to report when they see it on the app. Would give 0 stars if it was an option. stop adding features like allowing your icons to show when posting and start doing things to actually keep your user base safe, thanks.

Bullying. This app is the #1 cause for bullying at universities and schools everywhere. It shouldn’t have been made, it’s an outlet for people to anonymously attack others and “expose them”. Also name dropping is ridiculous and the fact the creators of this app haven’t found a way to attack that issue is absurd. You guys feed into the toxic attitude and personalities of the worst people everywhere. Idk what the goal was by creating an app that you could publicly and anonymously make fun of people and cause them to hurt themselves but it’s not okay. You’re everything wrong with society today and if you don’t realize what you’re doing wrong, that only makes you more of an issue. I truly think you need to delete this app from the App Store before more people hurt themselves from cyber bullying.

Was happy Yak was back until…. Personally, I love Yik Yak. I was on it when I first went to college and I’m still in college at this point, and I rejoiced when I saw an ad for it. It was great getting to talk to some of the people that were seasoned users. That was… until the high school close by found it. There is so much hate speech and sexually explicit content being posted, along with real names being used, and at an amazing rate at that. It’s like a new post every two minutes. Then when the other users complain, there are so many of the high schoolers that they downvote it until the post is deleted almost immediately. It’s very sad to see. I have been reporting every single post to try to combat it but it keeps going. Unfortunately I will not be using the app anymore, it was great while it lasted… a week.

Update makes app terrible and not worth having. I had yik yak a while ago (4+ months) and chose to uninstall because I spent too much time on it, a testament to how enjoyable it was. Reinstall to find i can only speak with students at my university, severely limiting the experience of the app. My school and most others already have platforms for student wide discussion that have much wider adoption and much better ui (discord, reddit, etc.). The joy of yik yak was always two things: its simplicity and universality. Even after adding dms (a mistake in my opinion, it took away from the simple message board style of the platform) the app was still worth using because of the wide variety of strangers you could interact with based solely on geographic location. The enjoyment of the app has NEVER been interacting only with people on my campus, but in interacting with those who were immediately around me throughout my city, whether we have anything in common or not. From the messages in the app, I can tell most share this sentiment. I sincerely hope the developers realize their mistake and can finally understand what drew people to their creative app in the first place.

4.0 Will Kill This App Unless Undone. Adding images was a mistake and floods the app with the same spammed memes as every other social media. Making colleges their own “communities” defeats the purpose of the local anonymous messaging feature, which is the whole point of the app. Right now, it is a worse version of Reddit for colleges with a side mode that allows local area posting. I have a feeling that this app’s developers were pressured by college boards receiving news of cyberbullying and got scared/threatened with legal action into neutering the app. There are some good features in 4.0, such as being able to comment anonymously, but unless the general model is reverted to how it used to be then this app will die. People are already leaving, and that’ll only snowball.

Stop being so picky and liberal!. I made a harmless post stating my unpopular opinion that: pronouns are taken too far because people should not expect others to assume and remember peoples pronouns when they are very clearly female. It got removed like 2 minutes after posting and I am banned for 48 hours now?? Like seriously stop being such a snowflake and let people express their opinions. It should not be regulated, it is free speech, and I fully addressed that it was a controversial opinion. It is not your place to censor that and take it down, let alone ban me. People should be able to express these things. It was not an unsafe or harmful post whatsoever so that is not recipe for removal. If we can’t openly talk about these things that is unfair and stupid. Deleting!

Love the app BUT. been using the app when it was cool in 2016 and recently (about a year ago) got it again when it was rereleased. love the app as its great for communicating BUT you gotta stop the time outs. people constantly report comments they don’t agree with, my comment gets taken down, and then i can’t comment for 24 hours. it makes me not want to use the app bc anytime anyone disagrees and reports it for something serious like harmful, i lose the ability to comment. Your moderators really need to start reading every comment that is submitted for report bc 7 out of 10 times, it doesn’t fit the criteria and we suffer unfair consequences.

Changing for the worst. I just wanted to hop on and add to the growing audience of people who want to let it be know that they don’t like the direction yik yak has taken. the reason i liked yik yak was the herd. i don’t want to be tied to my university because i’m not always going to be AT MY UNIVERSITY and i want to be able to communicate with people in my community wherever that community may be at any given time. i have ZERO interest in hopping on wannabe “subreddits” on this app and it’s boring to see people occasionally post to the university feed when i’m home for the summer and aching to see what people in my hometown have to say. if any developers even look at reviews or care—your app is no longer enjoyable. if you want it to be big, think about what made it popular in the first place.

Good Idea, Bad Execution with Update. Straight up, the old app before the latest update was better. YikYak was unique that it allowed you to anonymously chat with local strangers, which inadvertently lead to community. But people still knew you through your unique icon/color. Now it’s like a downgraded Reddit with true anonymity. I do like that the character limit has been increased from 200 to 255. And I think the addition of global topic communities was good in concept. But forcing everyone to log in with their college email was a terrible idea because it ripped people out of their local tribe. In an age with online classes, many individuals attend college remotely and have little interaction with that community. Literally, people were ripped from their local tribe and forced into an unknown community. This has caused a significant decrease in usage; either people don’t want to interact with their college community, they don’t understand how to interact with their local tribe, or they have too many topic communities to join and don’t know which to interact with. Personally, I don’t think I’ll continue using the app, at least not as much as before.

Ruined it with the new update. Im not a college student but I enjoy the tea and knowing whats going on in my neighborhood since I live in a big city. I get updates on anything dangerous going on but the new update makes it only for college students. I know multiple people in their mid to late 20s using the app for the same reason. To chit chat figure out why the cops are where they were if that was a gunshot etc plus drama. Its fun but they ruined it. I was even making friends with other people in there my age. They ruined it. Was having a nice convo with another girl about relationships advice and now she thinks I ghosted her. So rude Yikyak. So rude. I grew up on yikyak in highschool and college and remember it shutting down the first time. Seems like it is gonna repeat the cycle. You took away some peoples sense of community. So rude.

New update has broken my experience. Cheap Reddit knockoff for universities now. Used to be more like an anonymous Twitter feed for your area which was both useful and fun for many, not just college students. I had been using YikYak for years when it was first launched in 2016 (around the time I was starting college) I was saddened when it went down for several years and finally returning with the same great features. Now out of college, was happy to see the return of the YAK, But your herd isn’t just a university but your community at large. I have made great friends and connections and got great anon advice from others. But the golden years of YikYak are over, now there is gatekeeping and controlled environment threads that make it look just like Reddit.

Fun but incompetently run. Being able to anonymously post your ridiculous thoughts to others from your same college is such a great idea and can be so much fun, but I don't think anyone who has ever owned or operated this app understands why. When it was purchased by Sidechat, they gutted everything that made YikYak unique and turned it into a worse version of Sidechat before reverting to what people wanted. Recently they've been trying to introduce features such as usernames, which directly contradict what makes this app fun. I'm not gonna act like i know how to design apps or run a profitable social media platform, but what I do know is that these people dont understand the appeal of the app.

Could be so much more. I remember using yikyak in high school when it first came back, so i was super excited to see its return but oh my goodness, is it even worth it? The app barely runs, it’s slow, and frustrating to navigate. The marketing for the app is lackluster, i only hear about it through word of mouth. If you guys want more people to join, you gotta market yourselves way better. There’s an entire new generation of people who have 0 idea what yikyak was. So how are you gonna make them excited for the app? Yikyak is nothing without an active user base. Then there’s the removal fiasco. We don’t know which yaks have been taken down, but sometimes people can still comment on them? it’s entirely too confusing. I think the app has great potential to do better, but that all depends on if the devs are gonna listen their users :/

extremely buggy and slow. I love yik yak and I love the anon communication between my peers in my college town. That being said, this app is really poorly done. It’s completely unresponsive sometimes and crashes constantly. It works decently about 50% of the time and it’s pretty much unusable the other 50%. The notification tab also needs some work, the “Someone also commented on a yak you commented on” is pretty unhelpful when you’re trying to differentiate between threads or getting a lot of notifications. It could be a really great app if it had some performance fixes and user-interface updates. I’m going to continue using it, but I wish it was better.

YikYak did it’s users dirty!. I have been a loyal YikYak user since it first came out—the first time. Then, when they shut it down in 2017, I was bummed and missed it greatly. Needless to say, when the Yak rose from the grave in 2021, I was thrilled to get back to some anonymous posting. I made many friends in my four herds (shoutout to the spaceship feature, which was 🔥, but apparently is no more) and looked forward to interacting on a daily basis. I spent WAY too much time on the app, but I loved it. But I should have known it was too good to be true because a few days ago, YikYak lied to its users and sent an enthusiastic message stating that DMs would be getting reset and revamped. But what they failed to mention was that they sold the app to sidechat and would be updating it (actually, it was more like stripping it down and making it more garbage-like) so it would be a carbon copy of sidechat—oh, and it’s now only for people with .edu email addresses. No advance warning, no chance to say goodbye to your herd/friends, no nothing except ruining an awesome app everyone loved. Would have been nice if YikYak’s management was honest with its loyal users, but no such luck. Rest In Peace, YikYak—again.

Not a fan of the new update. Been using this app for well over a year, always enjoyed it. But I am really REALLY not a fan of the fact that you’re asked to join via your student/edu email. And asking a bunch of questions about age etc. feels like it’s defeating the purpose of the app being anonymous. I just really do not feel comfortable tying my professional/school email with any app that isn’t strictly for a professional purpose. Also what about alumnis whose school emails get deleted? I understand wanting to keep people safe but the update made it seem like it would be an option to join the college communities, not that it would be exclusive to them. Until the email thing is changed I don’t feel comfortable continuing use of the app, but it was fun while it lasted!

A well loved app that needs some help. I adore Yik yak and always have. It’s one of the most entertaining and freeing apps I’ve used. However, 2 major issues with this new version. 1) the lagging and app crashes make it really annoying to log on. It always says “you’re the first one here” until I refresh like 10 times 2) the moderating is really bad. Especially the automoderating. I got my post taken down for writing peacock. Like the bird. Where I was telling a story about being chased by a peacock !! But I read yaks every day about how h*rny someone is or sucking t*tties. The picking and choosing of which “cuss” words are ok and which aren’t is STRANGE. And my peacock story was very funny!!!

Terrible.. Your community guardrails are terrible. Countless yaks get deleted for bullying or harassment when they have nothing to do with either of the subjects. I had a yak removed because I said the word redneck, not even describing a person. The guardrails are a joke and prevent many funny yaks from being posted for no reason. This desperately needs to be fixed because I am seriously fed up with trying to figure out why my yak was removed with no option to appeal it. On top of this, the new update has completely ruined the app. After reviewing the privacy policy I see that the app ties you to your college and collects your email. This poses a massive threat to the security of peoples data. Overreaching colleges could potentially punish students for exercising their first amendment right. Because of this I will not be using the app anymore.

Ruined by Sidechat acquisition. Yik Yak was historically a great hyper local app: a way to engage with people in your immediate community. The app’s acquisition by Sidechat has ruined this use case. Yik Yak poster are either forced into joining college communities (presumably that if the college from which they graduated) or into abandoning the app altogether after years of use. Way to alienate the user base! Additionally, the content moderation is far too heavy handed. I’m a political moderate; any political comments I’ve made are well within mainstream discourse. I’ve been given timeouts on multiple occasions, and as near as I can tell the reason is entirely because someone disagreed with the position I took. Meanwhile plenty of anti-Semitic and other extremist views are flourishing.

Was a good run for a while. I voted on the poll they released a while ago for them to add more features, that, to its credit, they did end up adding them. But that’s what I voted for. I wanted them to *add* features, not take them away. The new update took the proximity gimmick and turned it into a college-student-only app. I really like the new additions, but our campus’s herd is so boring without the U of M to make it better. Keep everything you have now, add back the proximity function. Until then my rating will stay a 1. I’d probably rate it a 3 in its current state because it is a well made app, but the removal of proximity is so bad that I have to rate it 1 star to get their attention. Yik Yak isn’t really “corporate”, so I doubt they will make the app worse to drive up sales. Hopefully they take our criticism into account again.

HIGHLY dislike new update. I would have left 4 or 5 stars before the big update, but I think I’m gonna delete the app until the developers fix it (if they do). 1. Allowing people to comment without their icons is resulting in people being much meaner since they’re completely anonymous. It also removes how personal it felt before. I could recognize yik yakers in the comments because of their icons. It was fun to get to know people this way! I REALLY miss this feature. 2. I also dislike how you no longer get notified when someone comments on the same thread as you. When you only get a notification when someone directly replies to you, you aren’t really able to have conversations with multiple people under the same thread. Again, it takes away the community feeling I used to get from yik yak. These 2 features being gone ruins the entire app for me. I REALLY hope the developers consider reverting these changes. Not angry and not hating, but I’ll not be using the app unless it somehow goes back to how it was (not in every sense—just the 2 features described above).

Needs fixes. Right now the app still needs a lot of fixing up and other quality of life features. The app has issues loading posts and comments, which they already acknowledged. Slow to load or says there are no posts in the area. Specific details in the notifications so I know which post the notification is about. It needs notification grouping within the app so I don't just see "someone else commented on a post" over and over instead of one notification that says "6 others commented". It would also be nice if for some rural or less densely populated areas the app radius was bigger than 5 miles. Very low activity in many locations.

Good but has some bugs. First off, I'm so happy that Yak is back!! I missed how fun this app was during my college years. I understand that they're probably still making changes to the app, but here's some comments I have: - First off, I'm noticing some general lag issues, as well as having the app crash once or twice. Also my feed is empty half the time. - It took me a while to figure out that the sidebar with most of the options is hidden unless you press the grey button above the "new yak" button. It's pretty inconspicuous so I suggest making some UI improvements. - There should be a "mute yak" option. This is a big one. I've already been in a couple of instances where I get caught in a storm of notifications from something I commented on and am no longer interested in. - I'd like the ability to expand my radius. As I'm no longer in school and stuck in the sleepy 'burbs, it'd be nice to see what people in other locations are yakking about when my feed is lacking in variety.

The most horrible app.. This app is completely and utterly disgusting. There seems to be no sort of filtering against people posting full names and cyber bullying, even though the community guidelines claim to do so. I understand the idea in theory, but this app needs some major upgrades in order to not continue causing serious harm to the mental health of teenagers and young adults. I think there needs to be a better system of automatically blocking posts with trigger words, such as peoples full names or having to do with bullying. Obviously I do not understand the logistics of this, but there needs to be a change. Honestly, the best idea would be to just delete the app as a whole. Do not download this for the sake of your mental health. And don’t support an app the is an open and anonymous forum for flat out bullying.

University email no longer required!! :). Thrilled to see they updated the app so that everyone can use it again. I hope everybody who was kicked out bc of the college email requirement comes back and gives it another chance. I only rated 4 stars because the app itself is still totally different than it was before. It’s basically like Reddit now where you can post to different communities and I'm just not a fan of the overall appearance. I liked it better when it was clean cut and simple. All in all I’m just happy I can connect with people in my community again! Thank you yikyak

This app failed the first time; it’s not any better now.. This app used to be under a different name about six or seven years ago. The first time it was created, it was a disaster; it’s not any better. With this new generation and the division between politics and opinions, this app is a dumpster fire for educational buildings and public areas. If someone disagrees with your public appearance, they can anonymously bully you if you both have the app. It was not at all a good idea the first time, and it’s not a good idea this time. So many kids in my school alone are being bullied by people that they don’t know, which really doesn’t help their mental state. Don’t get me wrong though, the idea for this app is out there for sure but it needs some adjustments so that it isn’t as bad as the first time. Change how it works, and I would gladly raise my review. Thanks.

Frustrated. Myself and many other users have been asking for different communities to be added for months now. A lot of the suggestions posted in the Suggest A Community space gain many upvotes yet none of these suggestions have been added. Instead topics that I’ve either seen no one or only a couple people ask for are getting communities. Despite both frequently posting and filling out the google form to request a community we’ve been ignored. I’m interested in how this app could grow with the addition of some of these communities, so this makes me sad and frustrated. I’d at least like a reason for why these communities aren’t being added if nothing else.

gone yakking. i can’t really complain too much about the function of this app aside from occasional loading issues and the automatic censoring system being asinine, but i would just really love to see a DM feature be implemented at some point! idk if it’s even possible given the format but i think it would be so fun and useful to be able to message people and still maintain public anonymity. and although some people say terrible things bc they’re anonymous on it, i love actually feeling a sense community and connection to my college campus through it :)

Newest Update = Pornographic Images. Yikyak used to be like twitter, now it’s like Phub. The new update allows pictures to be posted. I have seen endless pornographic pictures and ads (these are not yikyak ads, but the users advertising their bodies and sexual abilities) since the new update. They get removed immediately, but you can still see it until you refresh your page, so you can see it for hours if you never refresh. Not only has yikyak lost the fun of being able to post whenever you want thanks to the post limit, but now you have to see vulgar images and posts. The app has lost all its charm and functionality while also becoming an extremely sexual platform. Would not recommend to any children or anyone with innocent eyes. Yikyak needs to either reverse this update or become an 18+ app

Take back my previous rating. I was originally all for this app bc I wanted to get in touch with my college community and stuff, but whatever happened over the course of the summer is the absolute worst. You can barely post anything in this app without getting sexually harassed by randos. They will find the smallest thing in your post and just come in your dms trying to get you in their pants. Blocking them hardly does anything since there’s plenty more and there’s no way to know if anything comes out of reporting them! Don’t get me wrong, there is still community! Not everyone is posting inappropriate stuff, but there’s just enough douches that sexual harassment is a daily occurrence. It’s funny because they don’t even know my gender. They just read something, interpret it as “game” and go for it. For all I know they’re also harassing the unpreferred sex. My favorite example was the time I asked if the bars were safe for the night and dudes just dmed me asking me to hook up with them instead. It’s so stupid and degrading.

The Herd Isn’t Always Right. Hello, I downloaded this app at the start of college and was interested in chatting with people nearby. However, all I got was sponsorships for weed and call outs for sex. I would post my idea, getting a decent amount of yak karma as well, but at the same time if you posted something against the “narrative.” Your post would get reported and taken down, sometimes without even a warning, even if it still had positive likes on it. For example I brought up the fact that apparently my concerns and ideas we’re glorified regarding Covid vaccines and the lab leak. Apparently there is now a high possibility according to the WALL STREET JOURNAL that it came from a lab. On top of this, they also say that, apparently, natural immunity is better then the vaccine immunity. The title of the article is literally “3 years late.” So I post this on Yik Yak and before it can be up 20 minutes I’m restricted from yakking due to violating the community guidelines. Apparently I’m spreading “misinformation” about the vaccine. This along with other events similar to this have led me to detest yik yak. If you get this app, you will find nothing but horny teens/adults and ppl trying to sell weed.

Massive Mistake. After months of using Yik Yak to connect with my community and fellow university students and building real relationships anonymously, it all got taken away in a single update. The beauty of Yak was the simplicity: talking to people within a 5 mile radius! Even having a spaceship option was not an issue because it allowed you to jump back to home or school no matter where you were. Multiple of the top Yakkers in my area can no longer even use the app due to having Androids! My streak, past Yaks, and past Comments are all gone. I can’t contact the people I have been speaking with for months. We loved what we had, the update is just very similar to Reddit and Snapchat all rolled into one. And not in a good way. There is also already a problem with sexist and racist dialogue on multiple large communities. Without the tight knit communities we formerly had and an overall feeling of positivity, this problem is sure to continue and grow. Please consider what you took away and try to understand the implications both on smaller personal levels and in the larger scheme. Yik Yak was one of a kind, now it is cheap copy of other more wildly used media apps.

Very bad updates and weird banning. I had the app for about 2 years myself. I got it because of the 5 mile radius thing to chat with my campus and people in the area. It was a fun app. Then the updates started happening and it because like Reddit with subreddits. Alright that fine at least I still have the radius along with a campus only section. Nope. They removed the radius and have sections where nudity is prevent besides one thing semi clear line drawn over it. You would think that subreddit would be removed? Nope. It says up and is up as far as I still know. But I got banned. Why? Because I mentioned an app that was the same premises but with the radius feature they removed previously. I was apperently “ a danger to the community”. What? Yeah terrible app

Terrible idea for teens with nothing to do.. This app started out fun. People would post jokes and riddles and talk abt the people they wish they could be. And with just one hate comment the app went on a downhill spiral and fast. I have been harassed, sexualized, bullied and targeted time and time again because the app allows it. As long as they’re nothing about suicide or threats in it, you can post it! And anonymously too. YikYak has created yet another platform for teens to continually throw their insecurities away and become a terrible person because they get to hide behind an icon. I think the app had good intentions but got to the wrong audience. This app needs to be taken down. I’m tired of reading the nasty things people in my town say about me. It’s heartbreaking and we’re all better off without it.

It could be so much better. The concept of this app sounded like a lot of fun to me, so I of course downloaded it. And it was initially cool at first, and there seemed to be a few technical difficulties at first, but I thought it was because it was brand new and they will get it right. It’s been about a month and a half and the technical issues have only gotten worse. I can probably log on to the app successfully about twice a day if I try sixteen times. It just never loads. Also they remove some of my yaks that made me question why. I simply was talking about a fantasy subject from a book and they took it down I was not offending anyone or anything in any way. They need to get it together because this app could be my favorite but it is just such a huge let down.

Newest Update Removes the “Local” Aspect of YikYak. I work in development as a Product Owner. I know how difficult it is to change and update applications and set new expectations for users. However, if you just blatantly leave users out of the conversation and don’t communicate change to them except through a mandatory update, that’s just bad practice. Who is your Product Owner/Product Manager?? This is not how you handle an update that effectively removes everyone not in college from Yik Yak. What about those who used it for the local aspect to see what was happening in their neighborhood? Did you even ask the users if this was a feature they wanted to see? Was there any research done at all? This entire change, both UI and UX seems functionally broken and short-sighted. I know the Devs and QA have worked very hard to make these changes happen. This is 100% on the Product, UX and Human Factors Teams for being opaque, not surveying their users, and offering no further alternative. You all should be ashamed of yourselves and your lack of communication skills. Please let this be a lesson to all who work in product and technology of how not to update an app.

Recent update to the app was really disappointing. Like title says, the most recent update to revamp the app was extremely disappointing. I love yikyak, but this has definitely strayed from what me and my fellow yakers have came to know. There were some definite improvements but I feel it broke the sense of being a herd and only being able to see what’s going on in your local area. Being able to chat with people at a distance is cool, but most of the features of this app seem to prioritize that over the unique individual experiences. Also, that chatboard has to be taken down and fixed. Unsolicited nude and sexual content without consent is not ok. Ever. There is no excuse and this app clearly failed to get any peer testing before launching the update.

It's fine but.... I like the community this app can create and the new update is quite nice. The only thing i don't like is that it's abundantly clear the report system is completely broken. I've posted several completely harmless things that are well within my area's interest points (local events, campus topics, etc) and people report it to troll and it gets removed despite there being no foul language, personal information, names, bullying, etc anywhere in the original post or in replies. It's extremely disheartening because this happens often enough that myself and others in my area are considering becoming inactive because there's a troll(s) abusing the reporting system.

Watch a company destroy their good will TWICE in less than ten years. In 2016 the original Yik Yak made extremely horrible changes that drive our way from the app. They reverted these changes, but it was too little too late and they never recovered. They’re doing it again. They have removed the primary positive feature of the app, the 5-mile radius herd, the spaceship, and even every post that has been posted. Instead you are locked to your school (which will show on your icon that you’re from there) and they’ve added “communities” which are just bad versions of subreddits. All of them are filled with posts telling this stupid company to revert these asinine changes, but unless it happens in less than 24 hours (doubtful) they’re going to lose users and 2016 will happen all over

Frustrating now. Yikyak needs to start telling its users why things are taken down. I’m really nice and rarely ever on the app, and even then I never start trouble, but I just got out of a 6-hour ban and wasn’t even told what it was about. I checked and none of my posts or comments were taken down (I was able to tell because there were very few to begin with). I totally understand and support the report feature, even when people report just to report, which is annoying, but yikyak needs to do better at telling me why my posts were flagged (or implement mods to actually tell if they violate terms or not, there’s a lot of random reporting in my community). I don’t want to be permabanned without explanation, it’s making the app less and less usable.

Awful! Non stop bullying!!. This app is trash! This is just an app that teenagers use to bully other kids anonymously! Sickening! The terms say no bullying but bullying is actually all that it is. I live in a small town and downloaded this app because I heard my kids talking about it. We live in a small town and kids are actually addressing other kids by name on here and flat out making fun of them. Every time I log on here I see the same type of post making fun of the same kid’s. Calling them fat and ugly. If these kids end up killing themselves over the constant bullying and insults their blood is on this businesses (app owners) hands. They say it’s bully free and that is sooo far from the truth. It’s an app made for bullying and y’all have laid it into these teenagers lap! I hope no one hurts themselves because of this app.

College-attendees only now?! Bruh.. I just graduated from my university in December. Now I can’t use YikYak? That’s silly. I liked the app and don’t understand why having my very recent diploma makes me any more different from people in my area and (generally) my age. I can understand the basic argument, like that if I ain’t in college, I “don’t” have any valuable input for my university and its operations, but, uh, I had those professors, know the geography, and appreciate the culture of the campus community too. Getting my piece of paper didn’t erase those past years’ accrued knowledge and love for my university. If the app was solely (and originally) designed for college students only, so be it, and thanks for the memories. Just a shame y’all had to shut us out like we were strangers.

Ruined by bugs, but incredible otherwise. The last update seemed to have mostly fixed the "waiting for years to upvote something" issue, which is great. The problem is that I still haven't been able to delete my own yaks since I've had the app. PLEASE FIX THIS ISSUE. "Error deleting yak" when I have perfectly solid internet connection shouldnt really happen, so unless there's another issue that is a user-errort that isn't explained, please understand that a LOT of people aren't happy simply because of that. Really though, fix this and it's 5 stars EASILY.

Deletes comments and posts. I like using the app and all because it lets me see what’s going on on campus and the interesting things people have to say. When it first started everything was fine and a few posts and comments got deleted for violating guidelines if they did actually violate them. Now it seems like everything violates them. It filters almost all swears like it’s supposed to be an app for children, and comments and posts are getting removed immediately when theirs nothing wrong with them. I’ll post a comment to answer someone’s question, no swears, no one’s name, nothing mean or disrespectful, simply answering a question to help somebody, and it is immediately deleted. I’ll try it multiple times and the same thing happens.

It’s a cool app but…. I think the notification system needs some work. You don’t receive alerts every time your comment or post is upvoted and I think that would be cool to see that people agree with you or like what you had to say. The app itself is a bit clunky and doesn’t seem to work on wifi for me, but it seems like the developers are consistently working on it. Also I know it’s supposed to be anonymous but profiles/profile pictures would be kinda cool. Maybe options to upload photos to the feed also? Just some suggestions!

Clunky Automoderator. Aside from some of the other issues mentioned, the automoderator has an issue regarding false flagging posts and comments. If names are posted (including only using first names and celebrities), regardless of context, they get flagged and removed instantly, because it “may have violated the Community Guardrails bullying on Yik Yak.” The issue stems from the fact that context DOES NOT MATTER, so literal harassment is fine unless they bring names into it. Likewise, commenting on a current situation involving celebrities are really inconsistent: Amodio’s run on Jeopardy and the Petito case are alright, but the recent Baldwin situation gets taken down immediately, regardless of meaning, just because it references his name. At least offer an option to contest these stupid flags, if you actually care about having a quality product.

Needs moderators. There are a bunch of cool communities. The only community localized will be your university. That’s pretty bad considering the point of this app is to be in touch with people locally. The main problem however is little to no moderation. It started out as only yak could create communities. Now anyone can with few restrictions. It’s basically reddit now. Every community has its own hive mind mentality which mass reports people, spams the most unprofessional posts, and tries to start drama within other communities. Not enough moderation to keep up so these separate echo chambers are each in one individual’s control (not by yak, just a random person moderating) Many genuine users have left this platform because of too many changes and nobody keeping tabs on anything. Sad to say that today I’m one of them too.