With the introduction of Yik-Yak onto campus, students without the app, mostly Android users, have been reduced to second-class citizens amongst the Yakkers. These Yakless students are being forced to either swallow their complaints about their neighbors’ extracurricular activities or to spit them out in the presence of others. Many select the former option: in the words of one such student, “we aren’t quitters,” and if we couldn’t just walk away  “we might as well suck it up—we were there at the start, middle and end. That’s on us.” 

“It feels like no one is listening anyways,” said another student. “They’re always comparing something I said to some damn Yak Post. I just want to complain about the LDC pizza without seeing the same seven-word complaint written 12 different ways,” the student continued. Other students echoed this sentiment with similar stories about complaints not necessarily going unheard, but being broadly generalized, “I get that other people might have the same problem, but I’m trying to talk about me, not some unknown somebodies, I’m right in front of them with a tragic and cruel story to tell, but they look right through mine to the next; it’s like I’m undeserving of empathy unless I’m also an unknown somebody, a Yakked,” one student wept.

However, few Yakless students believe that they’re at a disadvantage. Most believe that the app could weed out the undesirables from campus social life. One such group of students has submitted a proposal to Dean Livingston and the President’s Office of developing a second campus, Carleton College: Faribault, exclusively for the Yakked. The proposal aggressively defined Yik-Yak users as “unoriginal,” “social media zombies,” “lacking in personality” and “parasites” of the Carleton community. “They never seem to stop scrolling, everything they say is a quote, and beyond their appearance, they’re all the same person,” read the proposal.

Likely because of their single-minded pursuit of all things Yak, Yik-Yak users continue to be unaware of the proposal despite attempts by the sympathetic Yakless to make them aware, and to bring them back into the fold. As the Yakked continue to be in a state of singularity, and absorbed in their own plane of existence, support for Carleton College: Faribault grows amongst students, faculty and administration. Trey Williams, an Associate Dean of Students, was allegedly heard saying to Allie B. that “by the time the Yakked are no longer Yakked, they may find themselves in Carleton College: Faribault, with no idea where they are and how they got there.”

By the time the Yakked realize that they are not in fact superior, they may receive the greatest downvote of all: ostracization.