Yik Yak app steps up its game by introducing photos

By Karen Tumbokon July 16, 2015

Yik Yak, the anonymous social app that lets college students post text-based posts, has announced that users will now be able to share photos on the service.

The startup wrote in a blog post, “Sure, you could describe that amazing eggs Benedict your mom just made for breakfast (let’s be real, sometimes being home for summer has its perks), but it’s often more tantalizing to share a drool-inducing photo of it, too.”

The company had been testing photos in a few Yik Yak communities, but will now roll out to all users over the next few days. To avoid nudity, bullying, and sexual harassment, the company made sure to moderate those photos before they showed up in the app.

While photos with faces won’t be allowed in local feeds, they can be found in the Explore section of the app. The Yik Yak team promises nothing will change about how Yik Yak works, and that users can remain anonymous.

The startup says, “no inappropriate photos (anything you wouldn’t send to your mother), illegal content, or faces will be allowed in local feeds,” and it will approve all photos before publishing them into the feeds.

To make the app feel more secure, the company also introduced phone verification to combat spam.

Yik Yak was launched by Tyler Droll and Brooks Huffington, two students who attended Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. Since its launch in 2013, Yik Yak has reached 3.6 million users, which many of them are high school and college students spread among 1,500 different colleges, according to a Business Insider report.

Yik Yak’s main feature is allowing students to make anonymous “yaks.” Similar to reddit, users can upvote, downvote, and comment on posts.

If you aren’t able to post photos yet, Yik Yak says the feature should arrive within the next few days.

You can download Yik Yak app from the App Store and Google Play Store.

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Karen is a technology, music and entertainment writer. Originally from New Jersey, Karen began her writing career in music…

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