Yik Yak tours the West

The Yik Yak tour bus, known as Sherpa, ends its California tour at University of California Irvine on Nov. 11 after visiting 26 college campuses, in 29 cities, and five different states.  Yik Yak, an anonymous social media app, is touring the West Coast college campus’s that have become popular users of its mobile feeds.

In the past few weeks, the company visited Bay Area colleges including UC, Berkeley and San Jose State University. California State University, East Bay did not make the cut for a visit due to not having a big enough herd, or user base on the app.

“The reason Yik Yak is much bigger [in San Jose State] is because of the population and the popularity it has on their campus compared to ours. I use Yik Yak mainly when I’m at San Jose State because it’s much more funny and popular. Here at East Bay, it’s repetitive some,” said Justin Tre Sarmiento.

Yik Yak allows users 18 and older to post on a real time message board based on their location, specifically a college campus.

Posts usually pertain to campus-related jokes, gossip, complaints, news, or just simply asking people to hangout somewhere. Users may give posts a like or dislike anonymously ranking posts.

While the intent for posts have been for entertainment purposes, there are instances of users requesting illegal substances or bullying, but posts that receive a total of five dislikes are removed. “Yeah in San Jose, the bashing going on it gets deleted automatically here at East Bay it takes two to eight days to be deleted,” said Tre.

Campuses with enough ‘active’ feeds are featured in their Peek section of other schools.

If the app is opened and is geo-located within a 1.5-mile radius of a high school or middle school, it blocks the feed and encourages the user to distance him or herself from the schools before opening the app again.

On their tour, the application’s mascot, The Yak, walks around to do meet and greets with the app’s users and fans. The tour also contributes games and jumper activities for students to enjoy. An electronic yak-riding game competition can be seen on the tour’s YouTube channel.

According to the company’s FAQ, “If your school’s most recent yaks are from four days ago, it’s not going to make the cut. Grow the herd, get posting, and we will notice.” As of today, CSUEB is not a ‘Peek’ campus on the app.