YikYak: Innocent Fun or Cyberbully Central?

What’s the last app you opened on your phone? Was it YikYak? Yeah, me too. Students from Gaines all the way to the townies and back are writing anonymously about what they’re seeing, hearing, and feeling at any given moment throughout the day. My favorite messages include complaints about the Get App being more annoying than Beta setting off fireworks at 3 am, and general comments about SLU wildlife. YikYak, for those of you who don’t know, is an app in which users can submit anonymous comments on a feed to those who are within their “herd,” or those around them. Coming from a kid who liked randomly Airdropping pictures to people in high school, this app fuels my need to create chaos without serious consequences that I would otherwise lack daily.  

Some of the content shares a bit too much for my taste (no, I don’t need constant updates about how lonely you are, but if you decide to post about that at least make it funny). I do have to say, the Dana poop updates are occasionally fun but maybe try the Poop Maps app instead. At least with the bathroom information, people become aware of what’s on the menu for the day. Another healthy alternative to the constant YikYak scroll is to check the @saintsmissedconnections Instagram, which is arguably better anyway. The filtered content is valuable considering the amount of Dana poop posts we’d have otherwise. 

Besides that, people tend to believe things they read on YikYak that they shouldn’t believe. Fact-checking is something we learn to do while at college, so I guess it makes sense for the first years to be spreading rumors from social media, but who’s to say it’s all freshmen? The Ebola kid clearly never existed, and frankly, the freshmen are so young that I don’t even think they were old enough to know what Ebola is. A Beta boy must’ve written that whole scheme. Too many Fall Fest artists have been discussed on the app, too, and I really don’t think Harry Styles (lookin’ at you @stlawuharrystyles) is coming all the way to SLU.  

All jokes aside, there have been some serious topics discussed on this platform – things like harmful people to avoid, how to reach out for help if you’re having a mental crisis, problems with the school’s administration, the wasps and bees at the outdoor eating tents, and how the school functions in general. Some might argue that anonymous forums such as YikYak are a bad thing, but obviously, some of the comments have helped raise awareness for student life issues. The dining faculty recently sent out an email addressing the bee problem and that they would try to fix it (who knows how successful they’ll be considering that the bees are starting to die off in the cold and indoor eating is back again), and Dana has an express line possibly from the YikYak complaints about long Dana lines. Even if the changes aren’t occurring because of the app, at least we can all bond over our SLU experiences together on YikYak while quarantined with COVID, food poisoning, and Ebola.