In Remembrance: The Death of Yik Yak

It was not long ago that university students felt they had a safe place to go and moan about their university life. It did not matter if you wanted to talk about that professor who set 13 essays to be done in under 24 hours or if it were to talk about the antics that you got up to during last night’s outing. Yik Yak was the place students went to unwind after a hard day full of lectures and seminars.

For those who used Yik Yak regularly, it was a badly received surprise when they decided to remove the option to post anonymously. The main point of Yakking was being able to unload everything after you struggled with your workload, or simply had had a terrible day at university and just wanted to have a quick moan and get a few up votes.

In my case, I loved using Yik Yak to post about the funny experiences I had whilst at university. Like the time I was going through a dry spell and happened to take the train back from London during peak times and had every stranger imaginable touch me in places, I did not know I could be touched. (A Yak that proved very popular with the Roho community).

But lately, the Yik Yak team decided to dig themselves a hole, and with each newest update released to the public they seem to only go deeper into a spiral. Instead of improving something they are trying their hardest to, they are succeeding at destroying an app that was once great.

First, they took away the option to be anonymous. Now they’ve broadened the geographical reach, meaning that we are no longer reading relevant information to what happened to at our university, but instead wasting our time reading that some random girl lost her shoe in Twickenham last night.

It just saddens me to see that an app like Yik Yak that had so much potential and is now becoming obsolete. There were times when Yakking actually helped me to de-stress and unwind while having a moan, or read other students moaning or even trying to get a few quick thumbs up by posting that new cool meme. I now go weeks without even opening the app, and if I do I am quickly reminded of all the reasons why it is that I no longer use it.

So farewell my old friend, we had our fun but now I must search for the newest cool app.