Looking for a social media platform that'll leave you feeling frustrated? Sidechat is your ticket. This app imitates the likes of Twitter and Reddit without adding anything new. Its only selling point, the university server feature, turned out to be a nightmare.
I joined Sidechat to connect with students on my university’s server, but a glitch logged me out, and I discovered the app locks you out for a whopping 90 days if you dare to log out of your university, making it impossible for me to access the server for 3 months. Despite numerous attempts to contact support, they've completely ignored me.
If you’re not a university student, save yourself the trouble and stick to Reddit as it’s literally the same thing but better, even Twitter/X is a better experience – they're light-years ahead of this platform.
Yik Yak was historically a great hyper local app: a way to engage with people in your immediate community. The app’s acquisition by Sidechat has ruined this use case. Yik Yak poster are either forced into joining college communities (presumably that if the college from which they graduated) or into abandoning the app altogether after years of use. Way to alienate the user base!
Additionally, the content moderation is far too heavy handed. I’m a political moderate; any political comments I’ve made are well within mainstream discourse. I’ve been given timeouts on multiple occasions, and as near as I can tell the reason is entirely because someone disagreed with the position I took. Meanwhile plenty of anti-Semitic and other extremist views are flourishing.
Harvard just got sued by a grad student over failing to handle antisemitism on campus. Sidechat comments were mentioned in the lawsuit. Within a week, all of the grad students were kicked off of the app. I don’t think that this is a coincidence.
Grad students are part of the community and it was nice to have a private community to ask questions. If anything, they could have at least grandfathered the existing accounts. Alumni get to keep their accounts so there is no sense in it. I’m still getting notifications of replies that I can’t interact with. We weren’t given an explanation - it just looked like we were banned for no reason.
There have been undergrad students in all of my classes and on my group projects. This forced disconnect is silly.
I love this app. Met some amazing and also bad people here, but honestly, it helped me grow. And I absolutely loved how it was all adults. But now, they’ve opened the Swifties community to MINORS. When this started, we were told it would be a college app for young adults to have communities. Now they’re turning this into something else that no one else wants. Not to mention it’s completely unsafe for minors to be on an app where adults are a majority.
Disappointed. Therefore, the 1 star.
As a new user search, it is very entertaining is different from usual social medias because it’s anonymous and you can only access it if you’re in college and I love that it has a community only for your college. The only feature I wish they were ad is something where you can see post that you never seen before. I’m not talking about the current tabs that they have but let’s say, for instance if I scroll through a good amount of old post, but not a lot, so on my feed or my main page, it would show Content that I never seen before and every time I hit refresh it would show me posts that I never seen before old or new kind a like Instagram if that makes sense not just going back to one day or five days
Let’s be real, you need an active college email to get onto your main community. With that being said, why are you putting adults in time out because of what they said. If i wanted to be treated like a kindergartner I would ask for it. I understand putting those in time out who violate picture rules, but based off something that was said by someone clearly old enough to be in college around worse? This clearly could not have been thought out all the way because no one in their right mind will try and get in between a college student and what they want to do or say. It’s not even like it helps, if the company actually cared, they would be more strict. I was put in time out for saying mild comments, when there are people on there daily begging to have sexual contact with someone. There are people who say highly explicit things, yet you see these same people and their emojis posting throughout the whole day. It’s honestly sad that companies now can try to control us because we signed (or esigned) their legal documents that 98% of students will not read. I highly encourage you to avoid this app if you haven’t gotten it already.
I’ve been on just about all of these anon apps. (I have adhd, posting non stop is like a drug). I’d never ever been banned or timed out, in my decade or so of anon apps. Until sidechat took over Yik yak. Over the FIRST WEEK, timed out three times. And now timed out indefinitely with all my posts gone. ONE WEEK IN. I don’t post anything controversial or non pc. It doesn’t make sense I don’t get it.
This is the most active anon app in a long time, I was briefly in heaven. I’ve tried contacting them, but looks like that’s it for me. I recommend this app but be prepared to only use for a couple days before they give you the boot for no reason
This is ridiculous… Sidechat bought yik yak with absolutely no warning and out of nowhere destroyed everything about it. They took away everything that made the app any good, and to make matters worse, they’ve made it iOS exclusive, which is absolutely ridiculous. Yik yak was a great way to meet new people and vent about life in general, and it was one of the most supportive communities I’ve ever come across. All of that has now been destroyed because of this one stupid company. I hope you’re happy Sidechat.
YikYak and Sidechat were perfectly fine apps separate from each other and each served their own purposes, with Sidechat being for college students and YikYak being more community focused. This merge of the two apps into one serves zero purpose whatsoever. They were not the same apps to begin with and each had their own unique in-app features, but now basically all of these features have been stripped away. YikYak is entirely unrecognizable now and all previous user karma and history has been wiped. Sidechat is now overrun by people who were former YikYak users and are now being forced to post on Sidechat forums and streams. This merge is honestly beyond ridiculous and I’m surprised anyone at Sidechat actually thought that completely taking over another, (much older and well-established) beloved app and ridding it of all of its defining features and merging it with Sidechat was even a remotely good idea. Everyone on each app is posting on the same streams now and everyone is confused and frustrated trying to use the new versions of each of these apps. The only way to solve this problem without tanking the ratings and reputations of both of these apps is to return them to their previous states.
Bought out yikyak with the intent of merging the two and just deleted everything on yikyak with zero warning, effectively making it a clone of sidechat. Note that they did this WITHOUT TELLING USERS, meaning that we all signed back in thinking we were using one company’s services when in reality we were using another’s. This is a huge issue from a personal privacy standpoint and really should’ve been announced ON BOTH PLATFORMS before it happened. If I wanted a bootleg anonymous reddit I would just use reddit! Given their complete lack of transparency, the likelihood that they pull this kind of stunt again, or come up with a worse one, is pretty darn high.
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