Yik Yak

I’ve never left a review on an app before, so this will be my first. I first got this app in high school because I had a really large school and thought it would be fun. This was when you could still interact with your local community rather than just college communities. Removing that feature was the start of this app’s downfall. It was funny to see everyone talking about teachers and what was going on around town. At some point I got a timeout for whatever reason. I never made rude comments on there or anything, so someone had to of reported one of my comments or something that caused the timeout. I didn’t understand and it never let me post anything else again, so I just deleted the app. I just re-installed it today because I’m in college now, and I wanted to join and post on the community. I joined the community and scrolled through a few comments. I then wrote up a post about our fall break that just started today. I tried to post it….and it told me I was in a timeout. A TIMEOUT FOR OVER 2 YEARS????? What sense does that make?! This app seriously downgraded, and it doesn’t seem like there will be any effort made to return it to its glory days. Unless you’re in college it’s a pointless app, and if you want to join a college community that actually functions normally just use Snapchat. I really, really, REALLY despise this company for ruining such a good app. Deleting it for the second time now and never downloading again.

I love checking this app and engaging with my fellow people on campus, but the app really needs to update its notification tab to show more of a preview of what Yak it’s referring to. The notification of “someone else commented on a yak you commented on” is helpful, and I want to check in on the thread, I love that. But, it doesn’t tell me which Yak that is. I have to tap that notification, wait 10 seconds for the Yak to load and then I end up checking the responses on that entire Yak. Right after that, you turn around and go back to the notification tab, and the indicator light for the notification you left is still on. You might be thinking, “Oh, just refresh it!”. Nope, if you do that, it gets rid of all the indicator lights for new notifications. So now, you have to guess what the next notification you should check is with no help from the exactly the same notification descriptions. I would suggest having a feature that changes the notifications from individual updates on each new message in the thread, to instead being one that says “New comments on Yak, ‘XYZ’” standing for the first couple words of that Yak. This way, it’s labeled and it’s streamlined because in the old system, I was getting all the updated messages in a Yak from just clicking on the first notification but then I still had to wade through all the other notifications about the same Yak.

I’ve been using YikYak for the first time over the last week and I’m in love with the idea of an anonymous Twitter for your home town. However this app has several things holding it back from being more enjoyable. First and foremost is that the app runs very poorly. The app is slow, sometimes completely unresponsive, loads yaks and info about them 30 seconds when you’ve already seen them, and has a myriad of other performance issues. And that’s just my complaints about app performance. It’s marketing is also lackluster, especially regarding their official TikTok account of which I found out about the app and it’s return. It’s TikTok account is so bad and so unfunny it’s how bad the app seemed that made me curious and wanted to download it. But it’s probably good that their marketing team isn’t very good because I don’t think the app could handle a large influx of more uses for reasons previously mentioned. The app’s aesthetics and animations are fine, nothing to write home about. I want to see this app do well and become a part of my social media circuit but it obviously needs the funding for the app fixes first and then to hire a new marketing team next.