Yik Yak paddywhack, is it on your phone? 

The social media app Yik Yak is intended for college students and has become very popular among ISU students. The app allows users to post comments anonymously in a community, or what the app refers to as a herd, within a 1.5 mile radius.

Yik Yak was developed by Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington and launched in November 2013. Droll and Buffington work alongside Cam Mullen, Yik Yak’s Lead Community Developer, to gain more users of the app. Users are referred to as yakkers.

“We love colleges and colleges are some of our best yakkers,” Mullen said.

To make sure that Yik Yak is being used by college students only, the developers have blocked use of the app at nearly every middle school and high school in the United States by using longitudinal and latitudinal points.

“It was created with college in mind,” Mullen said. “They [high school and middle school students] aren’t psychologically ready to handle something with that power.”

Maggie Kraemer, a freshman in biochemistry, said the material is sometimes offensive, but it is useful to get information quickly.

“There are no filters,” Kraemer said. “The material is not appropriate for younger children.”

The idea for Yik Yak arose while Buffington and Droll were attending Furman University. They saw anonymous Twitter accounts run by one person, so they decided to make a bulletin board-like app that would allow everyone to post on it anonymously.

Yik Yak is now available on more than 1,000 college campuses, and ISU students are some of the most active in the region. ISU students send roughly four yaks (or posts) per minute. About 25-29% of ISU undergraduates are on Yik Yak, while 12-16% of UNI undergraduates use the app.

Yik Yak puts the power in the users’ hands. Yakkers can comment, upvote and downvote yaks. If a Yak receives five downvotes, it is removed from the feed. Mullen said members of communities are good at downvoting things that are inappropriate and/or offensive to other yakkers in the community.

When the app was first developed, many administrators and parents across the country were concerned about the potential for cyberbullying because all posts are anonymous.

Despite the fact other yakkers may not know who sent out the post they are reading, workers at Yik Yak are able to see the IP address that was used to send the yak and the location from where it was posted.

Yik Yak employees are also able to work with local law enforcement if they see a threatening yak has been posted.

Cyberbulling and threats are taken seriously in the Yik Yak community, Mullen said, and the app has installed filters to pick out yaks that have words associated with racism, names, cyberbullying and homophobic slurs.

“We’re working everyday to make it as positive as possible,” Mullen said.

The yakkers in a community tend to stick up for one another and typically want to showcase their community in a positive light, Mullen said.

Students such as Scott Schulte, a freshman in engineering, said he reads yaks that other people post rather than yakking himself.

“People come up with some pretty creative and funny stuff on there,” Schulte said.

Schulte said as he reads through the Iowa State feed, he tends to see comments about the University of Iowa being inferior to Iowa State.

Yik Yak also lets users peek at other feeds. Peeking allows students from Iowa State for example to view Yaks from other colleges such as the University of Iowa and more.

If an ISU student were to peek at another university, he or she would be able to read the feed in its entirety, but not be allowed to upvote, downvote or comment on content since they are not members of that community.

“Pretty much every big school has an active feed,” Mullen said.

Other students, such as Taylor Fah, a freshman in biological systems engineering and Jared Thompson, a freshman in undeclared engineering, use Yik Yak for entertainment. Fah said she checks Yik Yak once a day while Thompson checks it once a week.

“It’s hilarious. People try to hit on people,” Thompson said.

Yik Yak has taken to traveling to college campuses within the United States.

“We have a 50 foot bus with ‘Ride the Yak’ written on it,” Mullen said.

Yik Yak is spreading the word and growing the herd.