Yik Yak Suddenly Blasts into the Mainstream

By Jeffrey Tucker
Mar. 24, 2015

Ted Cruz thought he had a captive audience when he spoke at the campus of Liberty University. Ten thousand students sat there attentively, all required to attend as part of the discipline of campus life.

Floating above the crowd, in a way that no one could see, was a different world of information. Students were using Yik Yak to make fun of the guy, mocking his every sentence. Some smart cookie among the media picked up on it and reported it. It's politics so the revelation became national news.

Now the Yak is out of the bag, and it's a big deal.

Yik Yak is the chat application that has swept all before it but only among a small demographic: 25 and under. It's been around little more than a year but the app is already valued at $350 million. Remarkable, especially given the notable simplicity of the idea and its functioning. It combines chat and GPS to allow anonymous talk in your locale.

What it does is reveal the truth, unvarnished by the intentions of the planners who purport to rule our world. The parents who pay for the kids to attend Liberty University have one set of political and moral values, but they can't control what the students think and do on their own time. Increasingly, and especially with anonymous chat, what constitutes the students’ own time is the whole of their digital lives.

This is why Yik Yak has been banned in select school districts around the country, due to the potential for being used and abused for cyber bullying. But of course such bans are completely unenforceable. "Whatever else you do, don't download and use application x" — this is probably the best advertisement that any mobile app can get.

But truly, the content of Yik Yak can be harrowing. Depending on where you are, the chats can be fun, clever, and wholesome, or shockingly vulgar, pornographic, and, yes, abusive. It's what you get without censorship.

So prepare yourself. Now that Yik Yak is in the national news, we can cue the inevitable hysteria among the bourgeoisie. The hand wringing and pearl clutching will go on for months. School boards will debate. Pastors will decry. Politicians will condemn. But in the end, nothing is going to stop the free flow of information that Yik Yak represents.

We do well to recall that this has always been the course of Internet innovations. Before the web, there were chatrooms and they were stuffed with morally objectionable content. And when the web went live, the two uses were predictable: porn and religion. There's nothing new about this. It was the same with the printed book that eventually became the mass market paperback. These two sectors of life are the early adopters of any new technology.

Right now, we are in the Wild West period of geographically centered anonymous chat. As time goes on, and the applications become more mainstream, they adapt to reflect the values of users. This will happen to Yik Yak too, as it gradually builds in content filters that reflect not political wishes but the tastes and temperaments of users themselves,

The story of the application itself is truly fascinating. It was developed in late 2013 by Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington, who were recent graduates of Furman University. Droll was in medical school and Buffington was pursuing a career in finance. But both dropped out once they developed the app and it started taking off. Now they live and work in Atlanta, improving the software by the day.

Over the last couple of years, as Facebook has slipped into a state of non-use by the younger generation, people have asked what the next thing will be. Instagram, Snapchat, texting with Whatsapp, Kik, and hundreds of other apps are all in the running. And truly, it won't be just one. The social realm is decentralizing and disintermediating.

Yik Yak really does something different. It taps into our desire, too often forgotten amid the excitement of globalization, to actually be somewhere and in some physical proximity with a localized culture. So the default is to show you exactly what's happening where you happen to be. From here you can post anything, upvote other people's posts, and contribute the ongoing formation of a cloud-based conversation.

Who is posting? It can be anyone, your neighbor, the guy next to you in class, someone at the gas station down the street, that person walking her dog, and so on. People are careful to not give too much information so that their identity can be discovered. I laughed at one posting I recently saw: "I'm so happy that my Yak has so many upvotes, but then I remember that no one knows it's me!"

You can also use the app to travel and spy on any locale in the world, going from town to town to see what people (of a certain demographic) are talking about. But you can only contribute by chatting and voting if your geographic range matches where you are in the application. In this way, Yik Yak remains highly localized.

Like all brilliant digital innovations, the simplicity of it is very striking. But it's not so simple because it took these two entrepreneurs, Droll and Buffington, to think it through and act.

In years past, people would ask: how can something like this make money? What actual value can it add to the world in a way that is commodifiable? People used to say this about Facebook of course, but finally the lesson is starting to sink in. The value is the attention, the eyeballs, the use, the network. How it comes to be monetized is a flexible challenge that can only be addressed, much less met, once the network is assembled.

Then there is the larger question: what is the social value of such a platform? Isn’t it just wasting everyone’s time? Well, this question is hard to answer in advance of the way we see it being used in real life. Six months ago, most of what appeared on Yik Yak seemed ridiculous. Suddenly overnight, we can see the power in a platform like this. It allows people to get the word out, to speak their minds, even under conditions in which it would otherwise seem not possible or even dangerous. It is another way around those who seek to control us.

It’s another example of a “dumb network” with extremely smart end-user applications.

I'm delighted by such technologies because they defy the imaginations of intellectuals and planners who think they know how to run the world. We live in an age of nonstop experimentation, with entrepreneurs trying to discern the changing needs of people who constitute the acting units of social order. It is a world of progress made possible through creativity that comes from unexpected places.

In the course of this evolution, where do we find the highest value? It is in our conversation, in the sharing of ideas, the kaleidoscopic mixing and melding of random ideas, filtered and sorted and remixed by individual minds. In short, our yik yak is the most valuable commodity.
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Jeffrey Tucker is Chief Liberty Officer of Liberty.me (http://liberty.me/join), a subscription-based, action-focused social and publishing platform for the liberty minded. He is also distinguished fellow Foundation for Economic Education (http://fee.org), executive editor of Laissez-Faire Books, research fellow Acton Institute, founder CryptoCurrency Conference, and author six books.