Alex Schmiechen & Zina Ibrahim - Upvote or Downvote What Makes Yik Yak Posts Popular

Alex Schmiechen Zina Ibrahim

Yik Yak is a recently developed anonymous social media platform that users can access via a smartphone app. In order to determine potential indicators of popularity in Yik Yak posts, we examined which kinds of posts received the highest number of votes and comments. Posts were categorized as either a question or not and rated on a scale of 1 to 3 based on the following variables: humor, academic, love life relevance. We found that non-question posts had significantly higher amount of votes. We also found that there was a significant interaction effect between the question variable and the academic variable.