Students create anonymous online application

Forget Facebook  —  students today crave online discussion with all the benefits of anonymity. 

Rachel Handewerk, a freshman nutrition and dietetics major at Pitt, said anonymity online may change how people speak to each other. 

“I think that the anonymity allows people to be more outrageous in what they say, which can make it more offensive,” she said. “But it also makes it more entertaining and funny. Basically, you can’t take it seriously and the people who take it seriously need to delete the app.”

Yik Yak, an anonymous social media app based on users’ locations, inspired six college students to create their own platform for online discourse. The six students, including one Pitt student, created OpenVerse, an app to compete with Yik Yak, the popular mobile app that’s come to dominate the anonymous side of social media since it’s creation a year ago. OpenVerse differs from Yik Yak in one fundamental way: It is only available to university students.

With Yik Yak, people within a 10-mile radius of one another are able to create and view anonymous posts by those around them. The app, which debuted in November 2013, has spread to more than 200 colleges and universities nationwide.

Patryk Fusiarz, Ari Kidron, Matthew Sabatini, Nikhil Ramanathan, Napat Suthasinwong and Pitt student Robert Burger launched the beta version of OpenVerse in late September at New York University’s campus in Florence, Italy. 

OpenVerse will launch at Pitt and Rutgers University in late October or early November, Burger said.

“The problem with Yik Yak was mainly that it was not monitored and not really filtering out the people you don’t want on there,” Burger, a sophomore information science major, said. “So you’re getting a lot of creepy, random people.”

The six students began working on the project in May 2014 and spent several hundred dollars of their own money on domain and server fees, Fusiarz, a freshman at Rutgers, said. Fusiarz said Sabatini, a freshman at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, spent several hours per day coding the app last spring.

The group hopes to eventually regain their investment and make a profit on the app, Fusiarz said, but for now they are pleased with completing their short-term goals of creating a working app. 

It was the creators’ original intention to ensure that only university students use their anonymous communication app because of the potential for bullying and vulgarity that sometimes occurs on Yik Yak, though they couldn’t recall any specific examples. 

Yik Yak recently updated its terms and conditions to reflect a 17 years and older age policy and made the app easily blockable on children’s phones, said Zachary Nola, a representative from Yik Yak.

“Yik Yak recognizes that with any social app or network, there is the likelihood for misuse from a small group of users, so the company has put specific algorithms in place to prevent this from happening,” Nola said.

Some don’t see the bullying and vulgarity on Yik Yak as much of a problem for college students.

“All cyber communication on the Internet should be taken with a grain of salt because I mean it’s the Internet, you can just press the off button,” said Joe Weidman, a freshman at Pitt.

Yik Yak’s primary goal was to “create conversations and build communities without prerequisites such as prior relationships or connections,” Nola said.

“I think that a lot of people use Yik Yak for a laugh, and it kind of brings people together,” said Weidman.

Fusiarz said he believes people should have the ability to share and discuss online with fewer consequences. 

“Traditional social networks have become trophy walls,” Fusiarz said. “You’ll see some pictures of a friend’s cousin’s new car or a classmate’s trip to the beach, and it’s meaningless to you. We seldom share the thoughts and opinions that we truly hold dear out of fear that it will create an averse image of ourselves.”