The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak, the Anonymous Messaging App; New York Times, May 27, 2017

Valeriya Safronova, New York Times; The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak, the Anonymous Messaging App

"At the end of that year, Mr. Droll and Mr. Buffington laid off 60 percent of their employees, and last month, they shut down the operation, selling off intellectual property and employee contracts to Square Inc., a mobile payment company, for $1 million. A few months earlier, Hive, a college-based chat app with a similar color scheme to Yik Yak’s, popped up in the iTunes and Google Play stores, with Mr. Buffington in one of the screenshots. Whether it was an attempt at reinvention under the Yik Yak umbrella or a side project is unclear, but it is no longer available...

Morgan Hines, who will start her fourth year at Northeastern University in Boston this fall, never encountered nastiness on Yik Yak. “I thought it was funny,” she said. “It formed a lot of camaraderie between students. There would be random shout-outs to things happening on campus, like people who are attractive or being annoying in the library, or a fire alarm going off at 4 a.m.”

But Ms. Hines criticized Yik Yak’s hyper-localization. “Yik Yak was for pockets of people on campus,” she said. “If the fire alarm went off at 4 a.m., it only went off at your building, so no one else will give it a thumbs-up.”

That hyper-localization is also what made the cases of harassment particularly galling. Ms. Musick, one of the plaintiffs, said, “With Yik Yak, in the back of your mind, you know they’re not from around the world or other parts of the state, they’re right there in your classroom, in your dining hall. On a campus with 4,500 students, that’s a pretty small group of people. This isn’t some creepy guy in his mom’s basement in Indiana.”"

Naspa’s Annual Conference Was Going Well. Then Yik Yak Showed Up; Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/24/15

Andy Thomason, Chronicle of Higher Education; Naspa’s Annual Conference Was Going Well. Then Yik Yak Showed Up:

"Student-affairs professionals flocked to New Orleans this week for the annual meeting of Naspa — Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. It’s one of the few times of the year they can get away from students and their annoying habits like, say, their use of the anonymous messaging app (and frequent powder keg of vulgarity) Yik Yak. Sounds like a great getaway, right?

Foolish student-affairs professionals. When will they learn? Yik Yak knows no borders.

The conference — which, again, is attended by people who have spent time mopping up Yik Yak messes — has been at least partially derailed by some colorful posts on the app. The activity was so pronounced that the association had to put out a statement responding to the posts..."