In 2013, Yik Yak launched on the Apple App Store and immediately went viral. This anonymous “live feed” app allows users to post any type of written content in the form of a Yak. The more upvotes your anonymous content gets, the higher your Yakarma score. Think of karma on Reddit but just at a “ya” at the front. The Yik Yak algorithm to calculate your Yakarma score works very similar to Reddit. Other anonymous users can upvote and downvote the content submitted. Only you will know your Yakarma score as the app keeps everyone anonymous unless they choose to post a screenname, real name or pseudonym.
In 2013 and 2014, a score of 10,000 Yakarma was considered very high. That has changed over the years, much like with a Snapchat score. The Yik Yak app relaunched in 2021 after closing up shop in April of 2017. The new Yik Yak reset all Yakarma for users even if they had hundreds of thousands of Yik Yak points. For all intents and purposes, the Yik Yak app was not available, nor a product for the public, from April 2017 until August 2021.
There has been much discussion about this app as tensions can become very high when someone posts salacious content without having any consequences. The Yik Yak app is very popular on college campuses so one can imagine what young women have to deal with in terms of rumors spreading about their personal lives. This was the exact reason the Yik Yak app closed down in 2017. There are many, many news stories about college students getting harassed or shunned because of something that was published on Yik Yak. Yik Yak is truly the app for zero consequences for decisions.
In 2025, Yik Yak is still a very popular app amongst college kids. Note that users can only see “Yaks” that are within a specific radius of where they reside. This is why Yik Yak is not popular in small town America. In small towns, users open Yik Yak and see a single post or zero posts in the last several days. For a social media app to gain traction, there need to be users that are submitting content. If there are only 300 people in a high school and the county is 50 miles, there is no other place than the high school in which the users would see the Yaks.