By: Emily Scieszka | Staff Writer
Due to its reliability of entertainment for the entire Salve Regina campus, YikYak has been a fast growing form of social media. There is no doubt in my mind that if you asked every single student here if they knew what YikYak was, they would instantly know what app you were talking about. YikYak was designed to be user friendly and recognizable, which is why on April 5th, 2023, there was a lot of anger when the Salve Regina campus woke up to a newly updated and reconstructed app.
The most fascinating part of YikYak, pre-update, was that every single person on the app was anonymous and were able to choose an emoji as their avatar. This led to funny conversations between people in the comment sections of posts because they shared the same emoji or simply because they liked the other person’s avatar. However, with the new update, the layout of the app feels sterile and boring; probably because you can no longer see the colorful emojis that signify conversations between the users of the app.
When the YikYak app first started, it was promoted as another form of college social media, but it was pretty much available to anyone who wanted to get the app. The anonymous conversations or posts by users could range from one mile away to five miles away, leaving the circle of users very large and spread out. One of the most hated aspects of the new update is the fact that the app has limited users to specifically pick which college they attend, and now they can only see posts by people from the same college. “I know [YikYak] was mainly used by college students, but I don’t like that we can’t see what other people are posting,” says Morgan Kirby, a first-year student at Salve Regina.
Another feature of the new update that is not talked about very much is that the app is no longer compatible with Android devices. Most of the students at this school have Apple devices, so they never had to deal with this problem, but according to another first-year student, Kaylee Collins, “Waking up and realizing that my favorite app was deleted from my phone was horrible.” Now she has to rely on her other friends to scroll through the app in order to get that sense of entertainment back.
Overall, the YikYak update has been a widely discussed topic, and the consensus remains that the students at Salve Regina wish that it would revert back to how it was before. This is an app that many of us gravitate towards to add a sense of joy into our pool of social media apps, but with the new features provided, it proves that sometimes new isn’t always better.
Cover photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yikyak_homepage_April_2022.png
