The unique commentary was what made it, there was essentially humor that everyone could relate to and the unique perspectives people felt were too uncomfortable to share with their persona attached. It was fascinating to watch what would come up over the day
The exact same reason bullying could happen was the exact reason people loved it (anonymity).
Group A (parents, schools, etc) wanted complete de-masking + real-world identity while Group B (the users) wanted some anonymity with no real-world identity.
Yik-Yak could've never won as far as I can see.
I stopped using it when they added mandatory profiles. For online discussion, there is a huge difference between anonymous and pseudonymous. While anonymous, no persona is formed in the mind of other users, except within the context of a specific discussion. It is impossible to form factions. Group think is somewhat minimized, because no one knows it is you that is not following the party line on issue A, even though you are totally on board for issue B.
When you are pseudonymous, factions form, grudges form, prejudices form. Suddenly someone remembers your position on gun control and assumes your position on the death penalty. If you say something stupid, it stays with you.
I don't want to share my sexual interests and my political point of views with strangers and have those things be linked to the same account (from the user perspective). I DO want to do that without that link. I think it tends to focus more on the issues, and let's people avoid the artificial barriers that otherwise might come between them.
When they made this switch, it was suddenly an entirely different app. It was no different than just finding a random web forum, except that you could be sure the people around you were geographically close to you (sort of). Completely non-anonymous Next Door is better in that regard anyway, and Yikyak no longer had anything to offer me.
Same here. It seemed to me that they got rid of the one reason people were using the app in the first place. Also if this was to prevent abuse it actually made it easier to harass another user - 'oh it's that jerk qwerty123 again'
Another issue with being localized is if there aren't many users in the area. It was always busy in a city, but in a rural area there were very few posts - this could've been mitigated by scaling up the coverage zone
The -5 making things disappear wasn't the best solution, as the 'top rated' could become pretty generic stuff, whereas funny but controversial things could vanish quite quickly
remembered them doing very well on campus last two years of college. They had on campus reps to hand out "schwag"; probably not very fun to scale. The obvious bullying was the problem. If they had found some way to solve that and snuck their way back into high schools...
then again, kids can be so cruel.