How Yik Yak Keeps Its Anonymity App From Ruining People’s Lives

Illustration: WIRED

The dean of students said it was coming, and it arrived almost immediately.

On a Thursday morning in early May, during a faculty meeting at a private high school outside of Boston, the dean told Elizabeth Wendorf and her fellow teachers that a new smartphone app was rippling its way through other New England schools, wreaking havoc for both students and teachers along the way. The app allowed users to send an anonymous comment to anyone within a 1.5 mile radius, and it was rife with bullying and gossip. The dean predicted that this wave of nastiness would reach the school in the next three days, but it didn’t even take that long. “That day,” Wendorf remembers, “it hit.”

Throughout the day, Wendorf saw students crying in the hallways and others leaving school for the day altogether. The app was littered with anonymous commentary about “which girl has the biggest boobs or which girl has the worst mustache,” remembers Wendorf, who teaches math and economics. “It was like someone took the bathroom wall and put it on everyone’s phones.”

The scourge that hit Wendorf’s school was an app called Yik Yak, one of a growing number of so-called anonymity apps that have popped up over the last two years. These apps, which include well-known competitors like Whisper and Secret, bill themselves as a kind of antidote to social networks like Facebook, promising to provide a place where you can be more honest, where you can share your private thoughts online without worrying they’ll come back to haunt you. But there’s a reason sites like Facebook don’t allow anonymity. It can also turn people into vicious creatures, especially when they’re in high school.

For Yik Yak’s young founders Brooks Buffington and Tyler Droll, the story Wendorf describes is all too familiar. Since launching the app back in December 2013, the founders have seen similar scenarios play out in high schools across the country: one student hears about Yik Yak, tells his friends, and within a day, it has devastated an entire school, if not an entire district. “It’s somewhat of a patient zero kind of thing,” Droll, Yik Yak’s CEO, admits.

It was also becoming a huge liability for Droll and his young company. So he and Buffington decided to act, banning the very people who were flocking to their app: high schoolers. This has gone a long way towards eliminating extreme nastiness on the site–even college students aren’t as cruel as high schoolers–but there are still so many problems left to solve with the new app. The story of how Buffington and Droll are working to eliminate these problems could serve as a model for how these apps can survive in the future–without ruining people’s lives.

‘It Just Spread’

Yik Yak started as an offshoot of another startup called Dicho that Buffington and Droll launched shortly after graduating from Furman University in 2013. Dicho was a social polling app, which let anyone ask their friends a question and take a poll. But while they were building Dicho, Droll had another idea for an app that would allow college kids to communicate with each other anonymously on campus. The app would be location-based, so the conversation would be contained to a single campus. Droll was inspired by students who had developed massive Twitter audiences with anonymous parody accounts about campus life. “My thought was: ‘Why can’t everyone have that power?’” Droll remembers.

While they were still living at home with their parents, using free office space from an accelerator in Atlanta, Buffington and Droll built Yik Yak, and almost immediately, it took off. At first, they were pleased to see that on most college campuses, students were using the app for good, and any bad actors on the app got reported almost instantly by other users. But the high school problem snuck up on them–and fast. “We were a bit naive in thinking high schoolers could handle it,” Buffington admits. “To be honest, we didn’t even think they’d get their hands on it.”

Then, in late February of this year, just a few months after the app launched, the two founders began hearing reports of bullying from schools all across Chicago. “One kid went to a conference in Boston, and he came back and introduced it to his high school–we saw a Tweet about it–and it just spread,” Droll says.

The tiny startup, which has just four employees total, was inundated with calls and emails from concerned school administrators and parents. So Buffington and Droll did the only thing they could think of: they drew a geofence around Chicago and disabled the app across the entire city. They then spent the weekend mapping out every single high school and middle school in Chicago, and geofenced them too. By the end of the weekend, the app was back up and running throughout Chicago, except on school grounds. “We realized that if we wanted to create something that’s long term and sustainable, the communities we’re developing need to be constructive ones,” Buffington says.

Within a week, the team partnered with another startup called Maponics, which supplied Yik Yak with location data on 130,000 school locations. That enabled the company to block access to the app at 85 percent of the country’s schools in one fell swoop. “Since then, we get emails everyday or so from administrators of schools to make sure they’re blocked, which they almost always are, and if they’re not we add them to the list,” Buffington says. “That list is growing everyday.”

Yik Yak founders Brooks Buffington (left) and Tyler Droll with the Yik Yak mascot. Image courtesy Yik Yak

More Work to Be Done

Buffington and Droll still have their work cut out for them in keeping the app safe. Both bomb threats and shooting threats have been posted on the app. In those cases, Yik Yak has worked with law enforcement to both report the threats and to share information about the user’s location when the threat was posted. In several cases, that has led to arrests of those users. The Yik Yak team has now developed protocol on how to handle similar situations.

Meanwhile, Buffington and Droll still have to deal with gossip coming from its college audience. College students may not be as ruthless as high schoolers, but they’re certainly not pillars of maturity. The community is self-policing, so users can flag or down-vote posts they find offensive. If a post gets five down-votes, it’s automatically removed. But the posts with particularly egregious language in them are removed if just one user flags them (Buffington and Droll say they can’t disclose what constitutes egregious language for fear that users will try to game the system).

Still, some posts do manage to slip through the cracks, and as Yik Yak continues to scale, that will likely become a much bigger problem. The company now has users on more than 200 college campuses, with a new post going up every minute or more. And while Droll and Buffington say they intend to stay lean, it’s possible that these anonymity apps simply don’t lend themselves to the lean startup model. As Yik Yak’s own growing pains have proved, it can only take a day for an app like this to terrorize high school kids. And the young companies that create them often have to figure out how to minimize the damage without the proper people and processes in place to handle it.

“These apps have to show they can deal with abuses. It only takes one scandal where someone gets really hurt to create a level of popular outrage,” says Kevin Werbach, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at The Wharton School. “If they don’t anticipate them, they’re going to have trouble dealing with them.”