I attend a university where YikYak was extremely popular from 2014-2016 (new posts every minute, top posts got >400 upvotes). Getting rid of anonymity was unpopular, but what really killed the app was, right before summer 2016 they eliminated the ability to post to your Herd even when you weren't in the Herd location. People went home for the summer, couldn't post or even view the university Herd, and it died overnight. Didn't help that they also stopped sorting by top (and only by new). When people came back in the fall, everyone had already moved on (now there are only a handful of posts a day, and a couple of likes). People moved to Snap Stories, and now to Facebook Meme pages. There was no way people were going to get back on YikYak, no matter what features they reverted.
I'm not that person, but I think the Facebook meme pages fill a specific niche that Yik Yak had their hands in. Most Universities these days have a "$University Memes" page, filled with "relatable" content. Sometimes talking smack about a particularly tough prof, sometimes making inside jokes about the campus, or local dive bars. Yik Yak had this market cornered for a long time, but because of some dumb decisions it's mostly dead now
Whenever I see something like this all I can feel is insanely jealous that I didn't get to go to one of those schools. Their memes are so much better than my commuter school's
The other commenter is generally right, I think. I think what the campus was really drawn to was the idea of a place where you could express unfiltered observations about the campus community. The anonymity of YikYak provided sufficient cover in that regard, but so does the Meme Page. This might sound absurd, but fitting these same observations into meme format almost provides the same amount of cover that anonymity does. Now, the anonymity of YikYak did mean that there were typically many more controversial posts, but those posts almost never got any traction. The Facebook meme page seems to fill the bulk of the void, in terms of broadly appealing, humorous observations about campus culture.
