The Yik Yak app has declined in usage since Nov. 2014 and students are recognizing its decline on the UW Oshkosh campus.

The app went from two million users to 1.8 million in two months, according to Gigaom.com.

According to UWO student Chandler Lackey, it seems the growth of the app at UWO has started to decline.

“I think it grew in the beginning, but the use has somewhat declined recently,” Lackey said. “At first everyone was using the app, now you rarely hear about it”.
UWO student Sean Cara said he has also noticed the use of the app is starting to decline.

Lackey said Yik Yak can affect campus life in a couple different ways.

“Either the app could be used to promote campus events or different activities going on off campus,” Lackey said. “[Yik Yak] can be used as a recruitment tool, or it could be used to tell students how uninteresting a class or event is and act as a repellent.”

Lackey said while the app impacts students positively, he also thinks it could have negative impact.

“I could be in class, and there could be 15 to 20 yaks about the professor, the homework [and the students] and it would make me laugh and be happy to be there,” Lackey said. “Negatively, because it sometimes could distract the students from the overall course and the professor, like any app would.”

UWO student Cesar Mendros said Yik Yak creates laughter among students.

“Most of the time it has a negative impact, because most of the posts are negative comments about certain things that are not even worth the time,” Mendros said.

Mondros said while the app is enjoyable to use, it may affect students’ productivity and campus life.

“For me, it has a bad effect on campus life,” Mondros said. “It wastes people’s time.”

Cara said he has experienced a similar effect from using the app.

“It’s a way to pass time of you are bored, but it’s also an app I use when I’m procrastinating,” Cara said.

The lead community developer of Yik Yak Cam Mullen said the app has three purposes to serve.

“The three big things are privacy, being connected by location and curation of the feed by the herd through up voting and down voting,” Mullen said. “[Yik Yak] is special because you become connected with thousands of people around you based on location.”

According to Mullen, everyone can be a part of the conversation because there are no friend requests to accept and no one has to follow anyone.

Mullen said there have been cases where Yik Yak was helpful to students that were within the area of a campus.

“On one of the feeds, one student yaked that they ran out of gas and someone brought them gas, to help them,” Mullen said. “If a student loses something like a watch, they can yak about it and someone is able to report that they have found it and the location where it could be picked up.”

Mullen said safety is one of the main focuses at Yik Yak and there are ways to monitor the posts at every location.

“With any social media, we monitor posts because we realize there will be misusers,” Mullen said. “There are tools that are given to the communities for monitoring Yik Yak that allows them to find yaks and remove them from the feed if they are an issue.”

According to Mullen, the tools provide the ability to suspend and block users from the app.

Mullen said the Yik Yak app was released to the Apple IOS app store on Nov. 6, 2013 where it started in Georgia and grew to where it is today.

“[Yik Yak] started spreading slowly through the southeast campuses,” Mullen said. “By the next semester ,it started to take off to about 300 campuses, and it is now available at 1,700 campuses.”