
Yik Yak Systematically Downvotes Mentions of Competitors - burger_moon
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/17/yakgate/#9iOEGk:wzA
======
slimetree
While their response is pretty roundabout, my experience with
moderating/owning several community sites is that advertisements for
competitors really _are_ one of the largest categories of spam, and I wouldn't
default to reading an attempt to mute them as a "shady tactic."

Think about the point of view of a founder-developer. You have a list of bugs
to fix, a bunch of people to meet with, etc., all while manning a pool of
servers to make sure they stay up. Someone says to you, "hey, we're getting a
lot of spam from/about this company called Fade." I'd bet a lot of programmers
would just write "if 'fade' in message" before getting back to work on other
things.

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tedks
Fade was viciously spamming yik yak, on the other hand. It's pretty ludicrous
of them to pretend like they're being oppressed (and to compare Yik Yak to
North Korea!) for retaliation against that.

~~~
lsaferite
How do you viciously spam a localized anonymous message board?

\- Your posts a limited geographically \- The app knows your device ID \- The
servers should be able to easily detect location hopping

With all of that in mind, limiting SPAM posts should be simple.

If, instead, your goal is to suppress mentions of your competition, well
that's a whole different problem set and you see how the implemented solutions
works.

~~~
olefoo
First rule of networked application security is "Don't trust your inputs."

It's relatively easy to deceive an app about it's location; easier if it's
running in an emulator environment. And that works just as well for iOS as it
does for Android.

~~~
lsaferite
Yes, I know that. That's why I specifically mentioned location hopping. You
can also fake device IDs. To fight that you'd have to do even more. The point
being, a simple word filter is not how you fight SPAM, it's how you silence
something you don't want discussed.

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antr
I had never heard of Yik Yak until today (and the mentioned competitors). I
tried Yik Yak out, 5 minutes after it was deleted.

I can't express how disgusted I am by the contents/comments within the app.
It's full of hate speech, insults, sexism, etc. I find really disturbing that
these sort of apps get vc money, really disturbing.

~~~
sean_grant
You should know that Yik Yak is an amalgamation of whatever the users say
around you... If it's filled with hate speech, that would be your surrounding
environments fault and not Yik Yak.

~~~
bentcorner
Although the anonymous nature of Yik Yak encourages people to share things
they wouldn't normally share in the analog world.

~~~
pconner
True, but not every area has a lot of users that feel compelled to post things
like that, so seeing a lot of hateful content is still a reflection of the
people around you.

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bentcorner
The podcast "Reply All" had an interesting episode about dealing with hate
speech in Yik Yak:

[http://gimletmedia.com/episode/9-yik-
yak/](http://gimletmedia.com/episode/9-yik-yak/)

I like how Colgate University dealt with the problem, but it's unfortunate
that it's still there. On the upside, it allowed the conversations about the
hate speech to happen in the first place.

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misingnoglic
Really the thing that is/was cool about Yik Yak is how unfiltered it was.
Facebook has all these algorithms to see who sees what and when, but Yik Yak
just worked like a localized 4chan with simple voting. This doesn't really
help that image (but also come on what an awful way to "prevent spam")

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pconner
If this gets enough coverage, we'll see a Streisand Effect for the competitors

~~~
mathattack
True - I had heard of Yik Yak, but not Fade.

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burger_moon
I went to the yikyak website and viewed their blog and this was the first
paragraph from an article written last month.

"When Yik Yak was created it was intended to give everyone an equal voice. No
one user would have an advantage over another based on followers or popularity
and posts would be judged exclusively by their content."

[http://blog.yikyakapp.com/bullying-isnt-
cool/](http://blog.yikyakapp.com/bullying-isnt-cool/)

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dcs19010
Hi, CEO of Fade here. Just wanted to jump in and add a bit more color. I'm not
trying to pretend that my app wouldn't benefit from not having its mentions
blocked on a popular platform used by a similar demographic. But I do want to
make the case that there are serious ethical questions about a platform
removing its users' speech in a way that misleads them into thinking the
content was removed by their peers rather than a bot. And Yik Yak's claim that
this is an anti-spam tool is simply disingenuous.

Every account on Yik Yak is associated with a unique device ID. And each post
can is visible to only people immediately around you. So spamming any
meaningful percent of users on Yik Yak would be very difficult. You'd probably
need thousands of accounts. If it ever happened, it would to easy for Yik Yak
to detect and stop.

Under my direction no one on my team has posted anything at all to Yik Yak in
many months. So afaik, 100% of the posts being auto-downvoted with the word
"fade" are from ordinary Yik Yak users with no connection to the company. This
is exactly the sort of organic "buzz" that the Yik Yak CEO Tyler Droll claims
not to want to suppress in the statement he made to TechCrunch.

Yik Yak must know this because of its unique device IDs. Yik Yak can easily
see that the posts that mention Fade are coming from regular users rather than
spambots. That's why they are downvoting these posts rather than deleting
accounts.

Yik Yak's downvote bot is new. Previously they just deleted posts with words
like "fade." Why would they do this? In the GigaOM article just published, Yik
Yak CEO Tyler Droll claims that the one-downvote-per-minute bot was
implemented to "give people a chance to upvote [posts], which would keep them
from disappearing." This is flatly contrary with the way their platform works.
As the GigaOM article goes on to point out, even popular posts on Yik Yak
average less than one upvote per minute, so everything getting a system
downvote every minute is quickly deleted; nothing is "given a chance" to stay
on the platform. Yik Yak must understand its own platform well enough to know
this.

The only plausible reason for Yik Yak to switch from a simple block to a
minute-by-minute downvote bot is to obfuscate to its users why their content
is disappearing, to make it seem that their peers don't like it rather than a
bot removing it.

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yuncun
The 'tool' seems stupid (every minute if post contains 'fade' downvote), but
im genuinely curious - are there any rules against this kind of censoring? The
article made it sound like this was a bit of scandal, but is there anything
more to it than bad form?

Also Fade's notYikYak thing seems pretty juvenile.

~~~
jonnathanson
There are no "rules" against it. YikYak isn't the federal government, and it
has no such obligation to protect your free speech on its platform. If YikYak
wanted to soft-censor -- or even hard-censor -- any mentions of the words
"potato," or "HBO," or "Facebook," or "America," or what have you, it could do
so.

That said, it's a shady thing to do, and while not illegal, it's certainly
generating controversy and bad publicity. Time will tell if users vote with
their phones against it. That's the recourse here: not the law per se, but the
market.

Now, this would be a different story if YikYak had an overwhelming share of
the market, and the DoJ were to view something like this as anticompetitive.
But YikYak isn't a putative monopolist in the chat space. At least not at the
moment.

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ericcumbee
I posted "Time to fade away unseen" got -2 downvotes exactly at 60 seconds.

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rhema
The right way to test this is easy: just park your car between major cities
and make a similar post. If it is in a place where there have only been a few
yaks for the last month, then a robot vote would be the only explanation.

