Sometimes, startups make mistakes.
After talking to the founders, I don’t think Yik Yak is trying to censor its competitors through shady tactics. I believe they were just trying to stop spammy ads from appearing on the app, but inadvertently started suppressing competitors and their own users.
This appears to be a story about a young company that doesn’t have everything figured out yet.
If you missed the news Tuesday, TechCrunch ran several tests and found that Yik Yak automatically downvotes the names of other social apps targeting the college market — Sneek, Unseen, and Fade. That caused them to disappear after a short period of time, about 2-4 minutes in my personal testing.
I reached out to the founders to get more information. They elaborated on the brief statement about blocking spam that they had sent to TechCrunch.
“When we see repeated posts that say ‘Go get this [app],’ or ‘Go download this,’ we consider it spam,” Yik Yak founder Brooks Buffington told me Tuesday night. “It’s happened with mobile gaming companies, it’s happened with websites. It happens with a bunch of people, not just some of these competitive apps.”
This explains why their more popular competitors like Whisper and Snapchat weren’t on the list. However, when pressed to give me some examples of blocked gaming companies, Buffington and co-founder Tyler Droll were wary of naming and shaming them.
“We’re not interested in tit for tat games, so we’re not divulging names of who has used our platform to spam our users,” Buffington said. They explained that they never updated the list of companies that had posted an ad — it stayed static — which is why apps like Fade were still censored even after they stopped posting.
The sense I had after talking to Buffington and Droll is that they’re new founders, based outside the San Francisco bubble, trying to keep up with their runaway product. On their list of priorities, blocking spam in a thoughtful way might not have ranked very high — until now.
Downvoting is a poor solution to blocking ads. Compared to outright deleting the posts, downvoting makes it seem like other users are the ones who don’t like the posts, instead of the company. The founder of Fade, David Stewart, told me the company found out the issue from its own users. “There are enough people who want to write the word Fade [on Yik Yak] that students started to notice,” Stewart said.
He argued that ethically Yik Yak is in a grey area here. “If you posted the word Snapchat on Facebook and Facebook removed it, would that seem right?” he said.
Given that free speech is a core part of Yik Yak’s mission, it will need to figure out ways to be transparent with users. It’s understandable that the founders don’t want ads or spam cluttering the experience, but if the app has systems like this in place to weed out content, it should be telling people.
When I brought this up, Buffington and Droll didn’t have offhand solutions. “I don’t know if there’s an elegant way to do this,” Droll said. Perhaps in the future the company could introduce a one time only log in screen shown to users when they sign up, or even a notification that pops up when a user posts something that includes a banned word.
Yik Yak told me they introduced downvoting because they felt like outright blocking was too harsh. Sometimes posts with words like “Fade” and “Unseen” are either real posts or are useful to users. Instead of deleting the posts, Buffington and Droll thought that downvoting gives people a chance to upvote them, which would keep them from disappearing.
A college student I spoke with who uses Yik Yak several times a day said that popular posts get a couple upvotes every 30 minutes or so. That wouldn’t be enough time to stop the “spam” posts from disappearing if they’re legitimate. Yik Yak’s abridged tool would still likely remove posts from actual users.
We’ve seen this before — early stage companies make big mistakes as they experiment with new products, learn how to work with media, and try to grow. Some of these mistakes are more egregious than others (see: Uber threatening journalists and Whisper allegedly tracking its anonymous users).
Now that there’s been an outcry, they should develop a new system. But on the continuum of ethical errors, blocking spam using a crude, ineffective tool isn’t so bad.
