Yik Yak is Crowd-Sourcing Funny
Yik Yak is crushing funny through crowd-sourcing.
There are few moments in history as honest as the present. We are currently living in a world where the crispness and beauty of our ideas can be evaluated independently of the treacherous insincerity of brown nosers, social climbers, and yes men. I am of course talking about Yik Yak, an anonymized social media blog that allows you to view, comment, and vote on posts within a 5-mile radius.
The real genius of Yik Yak comes about ironically. Thousands of college students flock to this application to air dirty laundry, vent about frustrations in their relationships, and most importantly, say brutally honest and hilarious things. Users can upvote or downvote each post, and the general trend is that funny posts win the vote war. Yik Yak has been quick to capitalize on this phenomenon and makes it easy to search the most popular “hot” posts so users can easily view the funniest content. Yik Yak then goes one step further and takes the most popular posts from around the country and posts them on Twitter. This is the sweetest of ironies. Yik Yak uses a rival social media platform to advertise its most popular content. In a way, Yik Yak can now be seen as a curator of the funniest comments on the internet, and it does this by crowdsourcing the content from unwitting college students. Genius.
Yik Yak currently has approximately 400k followers on Twitter, which is a relatively small number compared to rival social media blogs Twitter and Facebook which have 13.9M and 47.9M followers, respectively. The distinction comes from looking at the average number of likes and retweets per tweet received by each one of these micro-blogs on Twitter. A quick perusal reveals that Yik Yak has consistently higher likes and retweets than either of its rivals despite its much smaller size. From a purely qualitative and subjective point-of-view (my own), it is clear that Yik Yak creates some of the funniest content on twitter through crowd-sourcing.
I can personally speak to the cathartic nature of anonymous blogging and immediate feedback possible on Yik Yak. As a professional seeking to maintain a level of public decorum, I am often unable to test out controversial views or jokes on Facebook and twitter for fear of retribution. The anonymous nature of Yik Yak makes it possible for ideas to be evaluated in the public domain without consequences. Anonymity also allows another interesting phenomenon which is the ability to decouple ideas from their speaker. If Justin Bieber ever becomes interested in whether his mid-morning musings warrant the 42k likes that his celebrity commands, he would be well-informed to post his comments on Yik Yak first to see if they withstand the test of anonymity. What a glorious future we might one day enjoy if all ideas were forced to withstand this test. In the meantime, let us heap praise upon the Yak.
