Yik Yak — The Anonymous Campus App That Died of Its Own Anonymity, Then Came Back

Yik Yak was the anonymous, location-based message board that swept American college campuses, collapsed under the weight of what anonymity invites, and then — unusually for this catalog — came back from the dead. Founded in late 2013 by two Furman University graduates, Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington, it shut down on May 5, 2017, with the assets passing to the payments company Square for about $1 million. That was supposed to be the end. But in February 2021 new owners bought the brand, and in August 2021 they relaunched it, which is why Yik Yak’s fate cell reads not “Shut Down” but the rare green word: Revived.

The original arc was a textbook venture rocket and a textbook moderation catastrophe. Yik Yak let anyone post anonymously to a feed of everyone else within a roughly 5-mile radius — a “herd” — which on a college campus meant a single shared, identity-free bulletin board. It spread explosively: within a year of launch it ranked among the top ten most-downloaded social apps in the United States, and it raised roughly $73 million from venture investors, including a Sequoia-led round that reportedly valued it near $400 million in 2014. For a brief moment two recent graduates ran one of the hottest apps in the country.

Then the same anonymity that fueled the growth fueled the harm. Untethered from identity and tied to a specific place, Yik Yak became a vector for bullying, racist and antisemitic abuse, and — most seriously — bomb threats and threats of violence aimed at named individuals and at the campuses themselves. Schools demanded bans; Yik Yak geo-fenced middle and high schools and, belatedly, tried to add handles and identities. The fixes alienated the users who had come precisely for anonymity without satisfying the critics, and growth reversed: downloads fell 76 percent in 2016. After laying off most of its staff that December, the company gave up.

Little users’ data was lost in any catastrophic sense — anonymity meant there was little to lose — but a genuine community of students lost their square, and the founders lost a company that had been worth a reported $400 million. The 2021 revival, under new owners promising “community guardrails” against the very behavior that killed the original, is the green note: proof that a network can be brought back, and an open question as to whether anonymity’s appeal can be separated from its harm. Yik Yak was later acquired again, by the rival app Sidechat, in 2023.