[zonkerdonker]

Anyone remember YikYak? I was in university at the time, the explosive growth was wild. After the inevitable bullying, racism, threats, doxxing, that came with the anonymous platform, YikYak enabled geofencing to disable the app on middle and high school grounds.

I think every social media platform with an "age limit" should be required to do this as well. And open it up, so that anyone can create their own disabling geofence on their property. How great would it be to have a snapchat free home zone? Or FB, or tiktok

[nancyminusone]

At my college, someone got kicked out for yikyacking "gonna shoot all black people a smile tomorrow" and everyone quickly realized exactly how anonymous it really was after the guy was found a few hours later.

Thing is, there was a comma between "people" and "a smile" which made his poorly thought out joke read a lot differently. Dumb way to throw away your education.

[lotsofpulp]

I don’t understand. The “joke” would be if there was no comma. Putting a comma seems like they wanted to cause panic, and feign ignorance later.

[wilsonjholmes]

Crazy Smart (;

Edit for clarity: /s - I went to the same university which had the above slogan.

[pmarreck]

So basically, if he hadn't added the comma, he'd still be at college.

So he got kicked out because of an extra comma, which he added to make it even more edgy, at the cost of reducing plausible deniability to nearly zero.

[myko]

I'm being obtuse but I don't see the comma thing making the "joke" come off differently, what am I missing?

[jmathai]

We block a number of online properties including Snapchat and YouTube using NextDNS.

We have different profiles for different devices to allow, for example, YouTube on the television but not on kids tablets or phones.

[soperj]

that's only good for the devices using your internet though no? not if they have data.

[dang]

One past thread: Thank You, Yakkers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223199 - April 2017 (108 comments)

Lots of comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[btown]

Ah, a world where this is taken to an extreme might even bring back the mythical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place rapidly disappearing in the American suburb and city alike... because it becomes the only place in the community where property owners don't geofence to forbid social media use!

https://theweek.com/culture-life/third-places-disappearing

But of course, social media companies will pour incredible amounts of money into political campaigns long before they let anything close to this happen.

[rollcat]

Technological solutions to societal problems just don't work.

Some $EVIL technology being fashioned to harm individuals isn't to blame - the companies behind that technology are. You can pile up your geofencing rules, the real solution lies somewhere between you deleting the app and your government introducing better regulation.

[Swenrekcah]

By this logic technological “progress” can not cause societal problems?

Which of course it can so why can’t a part of the solution be technological?

[kennywinker]

Geofencing around schools is the kind of thing you might see if government attempted to regulate this

[palmotea]

> Technological solutions to societal problems just don't work.

Ehhh, that's just a poorly thought out slogan whose "truth" comes from endless repetition. Societal problems can have technical origins or technical enablers. In which case a technical solution might work to make things better.

So no, there's no technical solution to "people being mean to each other," but there is a technical solution to, say, "people being meaner to each other because they can cloak themselves with anonymization technology."

[kgwxd]

Geo fencing requires constantly sharing location data.