Laughing and Yelling Through Yaks: A Content Analysis of Yik Yak, Exploring Humor Topics, Types, Styles and User Motives in the Anonymous Social Media Environment
Keywords:
Yik Yak, mobile technology, humor, anonymity, social mediaAbstract
This study examines 2,000 posts divided by a default thread and hot thread on Yik Yak, an anonymous mobile platform. Results reveal that 1) silliness is the most frequent humor type in both threads; 2) humorous posts with negative styles are adopted more significantly than positive styles in the hot thread; 3) “social media, media and television” is the most frequent humor topic; and 4) user motives are unrelated to humorous posts.References
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Alhadi, A. C., Gottron, T., & Staab, S. (2011). Exploring user purpose writing single tweets. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Web Science. Koblenz, Germany: ACM Digital Library
Anderson, A., Huttenlocher, D., Kleinberg, J., & Leskovec, J. (2012, February). Effects of user similarity in social media. In Proceedings of the fifth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining (pp. 703-712). ACM.
Antin, J., & Churchill, E. F. (2011). Badges in social media: A social psychological perspective. In CHI 2011 Gamification Workshop Proceedings (Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2011).
Attardo, S. (1994). Linguistic theories of humor (Vol. 1). Walter de Gruyter.
Bhat, S., & Reddy, S. K. (1998). Symbolic and functional positioning of brands. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 15(1), 32-43.
Bauckhage, C. (2011, May). Insights into Internet Memes. In ICWSM.
Blog.Twitter.Com (2015). Removing the 140-character limit from Direct Messages. Retrieved from https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/removing-the-140-character-limit-from-direct-messages.html
Blumler, J. G., & Katz, E. (1974). The Uses of Mass Communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Burns, H. (2014). Yik Yak app stirring up chatter on college campuses. USA Today. Retrieved from https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/personal/2014/03/07/yik-yak-college-students/6124405/
Catanescu, C., & Tom, G. (2001). Types of humor in television and magazine advertising. Review of Business-Saint Johns University,22(1), 92-95.
Chew, C., & Eysenbach, G. (2010). Pandemics in the age of Twitter: Content analysis of tweets during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. PloS one, 5(11), e14118.
Courtois, C., & D'heer, E. (2012, July). Second screen applications and tablet users: constellation, awareness, experience, and interest. In Proceedings of the 10th European conference on Interactive tv and video (pp. 153-156). ACM.
Dann, S. (2010). Twitter content classification. First Monday, 15(12). doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v15i12.2745
DiMicco, J., Millen, D. R., Geyer, W., Dugan, C., Brownholtz, B., & Muller, M. (2008, November). Motivations for social networking at work. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 711-720). ACM.
Eighmey, J., & McCord, L. (1998). Adding value in the information age: Uses and gratifications of sites on the World Wide Web. Journal of Business Research, 41(3), 187-194.
Flamson, T., & Barrett, H. C. (2008). The encryption theory of humor: A knowledge-based mechanism of honest signaling. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 6(4), 261-281.
Flamson, T. J., & Bryant, G. A. (2013). Signals of humor. Developments in Linguistic Humour Theory, 1, 49.
Friedman, R. S., Förster, J., &Denzler, M. (2007). Interactive effects of mood and task framing on creative generation. Creativity Research Journal, 19(2-3), 141-162.
Greene, J. A., Choudhry, N. K., Kilabuk, E., & Shrank, W. H. (2011). Online social networking by patients with diabetes: a qualitative evaluation of communication with Facebook. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 26(3), 287-292.
Green, N., Harper, R. H., Murtagh, G., & Cooper, G. (2001). Configuring the mobile user: sociological and industry views. Personal and Ubiquitous computing, 5(2), 146-156.
Greengross, G., & Miller, G. F. (2009). The Big Five personality traits of professional comedians compared to amateur comedians, comedy writers, and college students. Personality and Individual Differences, 47(2), 79-83.
Hartshorne, E. Y. (1943). Undergraduate society and the college culture. American Sociological Review, 321-332.
Helitzer, M., & Shatz, M. (2005). Comedy writing secrets. Writer's Digest Books.
Holt, J., & Sanson, K. (Eds.). (2013). Connected Viewing: Selling, Sharing, and Streaming Media in a Digital Age: Selling, Streaming, & Sharing Media in the Digital Age. Routledge.
Holzer, A., Govaerts, S., Ondrus, J., Vozniuk, A., Rigaud, D., Garbinato, B., & Gillet, D. (2013). Speakup–a mobile app facilitating audience interaction. In Advances in Web-Based Learning–ICWL 2013 (pp. 11-20). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Hummon, D. M. (1994). College slang revisited: Language, culture, and undergraduate life. The Journal of Higher Education, 65(1), 75-98. doi:10.2307/2943878
Katz, E., Blumler, J. G., & Gurevitch, M. (1973). Uses and gratifications research. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 37(4), 509-523.
Kim, J., & Lee, J. E. R. (2011). The Facebook paths to happiness: Effects of the number of Facebook friends and self-presentation on subjective well-being. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 14(6), 359-364.
Kim, Y., Sohn, D., & Choi, S. M. (2011). Cultural difference in motivations for using social network sites: A comparative study of American and Korean college students. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(1), 365-372.
Klink, M. L. (2010). Laugh out loud in real life: Women's humor and fan identity (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
Kolb, D. A. (2014). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. FT Press.
Krämer, N. C., & Winter, S. (2008). Impression management 2.0: The relationship of self-esteem, extraversion, self-efficacy, and self-presentation within social networking sites. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 20(3), 106.
Kuipers, G. (2006). The social construction of digital danger: debating, defusing and inflating the moral dangers of online humor and pornography in the Netherlands and the United States. New Media & Society, 8(3), 379-400.
Kwak, H., Lee, C., Park, H., & Moon, S. (2010, April). What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?. In Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web (pp. 591-600). ACM.
Lakkaraju, H., McAuley, J. J., &Leskovec, J. (2013, June). What's in a Name? Understanding the Interplay between Titles, Content, and Communities in Social Media. In ICWSM.
Lampos, V. (2012). On voting intentions inference from Twitter content: A case study on UK 2010 General Election. arXiv preprint arXiv:1204.0423.
Lee, E.-J., & Oh, S. Y. (2013). Seek and you shall find? How need for orientation moderates knowledge gain from Twitter use. Journal of Communication, 63(4), 745-765.
Levi, A. E., & Bauer, B. W. (2010). U.S. Patent No. 7,664,516. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Liu, S. (2012). The Most Popular Thing You’ve Probably Never Heard of. www.writingandrhetoric.cah.ucf.edu/stylus/files/2_1/stylus2_1-liu.pdf. Accessed at 2.3.2012
Lochrie, M., &Coulton, P. (2011, November). Mobile phones as second screen for TV, enabling inter-audience interaction. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (p. 73). ACM.
Mangold, W. G., & Faulds, D. J. (2009). Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix. Business Horizons, 52(4), 357-365.
Mersey, R. D., Malthouse, E. C., & Calder, B. J. (2010). Engagement with online media. Journal of Media Business Studies, 7(2).
Mills, R. (2011). “Researching social news – is reddit.com a mouthpiece for the ‘hive mind’ or a collective intelligence approach to information overload?” Paper presented at ETHICOMP 2011, Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University
Norrick, N. R. (1989). Intertextuality in humor. Humor-International Journal of Humor Research, 2(2), 117-140.
Page, R. E. (2013). Stories and social media: Identities and interaction. Routledge.
Park, N., & Lee, S. (2014). College students' motivations for Facebook use and psychological outcomes. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 58(4), 601-620.
Raacke, J., & Bonds-Raacke, J. (2008). MySpace and Facebook: Applying the uses and gratifications theory to exploring friend-networking sites. Cyberpsychology& behavior, 11(2), 169-174.
Ramoz-Leslie, N. J. (2011). Doin'it for the Lulz: a contemporary analysis of internet humor: A thesis in sociology (master’s thesis). Whiteman College, Walla Walla, WA, USA.
Reyes, A., Rosso, P., & Buscaldi, D. (2012). From humor recognition to irony detection: The figurative language of social media. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 74, 1-12.
Sanderson, B., & Rigby, M. (2013). We’ve Reddit, have you? What librarians can learn from a site full of memes. College & Research Libraries News, 74(10), 518-521.
Seidman, G. (2013). Self-presentation and belonging on Facebook: How personality influences social media use and motivations. Personality and Individual Differences, 54(3), 402-407.
Shao, G. (2009). Understanding the appeal of user-generated media: a uses and gratification perspective. Internet Research, 19(1), 7-25.
Shifman, L. (2007). Humor in the age of digital reproduction: Continuity and change in Internet-based comic texts. International Journal of Communication,1(1), 23.
Silius, K., Miilumaki, T., Huhtamaki, J., Tebest, T., Merilainen, J., &Pohjolainen, S. (2010). Students' motivations for social media enhanced studying and learning. Knowledge Management & E-Learning: An International Journal (KM&EL), 2(1), 51-67.
Strauss, W., Howe, N., & Markiewicz, P. G. (2006). Millennials and the pop culture: Strategies for a new generation of consumers in music, movies, television, the Internet, and video games. LifeCourse Associates.
Tsekleves, E., Cruickshank, L., Hill, A., Kondo, K., & Whitham, R. (2007, December). Interacting with digital media at home via a second screen. In Multimedia Workshops, 2007. ISMW'07. Ninth IEEE International Symposium on (pp. 201-206). IEEE.
Wang, G., Wang, B., Wang, T., Nika, A., Zheng, H., & Zhao, B. Y. (2014, November). Whispers in the dark: analysis of an anonymous social network. In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference (pp. 137-150). ACM.
Wasike, B. S. (2011). Framing social news sites: An analysis of the top ranked stories on Reddit and Digg. Southwestern Mass Communication Journal, 27(1).
Westlund, O. (2013). Mobile news: a review and model of journalism in an age of mobile media. Digital Journalism, 1(1), 6-26.
Winnick, C. (1976). The social contexts of humor. Journal of Communication,26(3), 124-128.
Wolak, J., & Finkelhor, D. (2011). Sexting: A typology. In Crimes against Children Research.
Yik Yak investment data drawn from: http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/14/yik-yak-is-close-to-closing-on-roughly-75-million/
Yip, J. A., & Martin, R. A. (2006). Sense of humor, emotional intelligence, and social competence. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(6), 1202-1208.
Zhao, W. X., Jiang, J., He, J., Song, Y., Achananuparp, P., Lim, E. P., & Li, X. (2011, June). Topical keyphrase extraction from twitter. In Proceedings of the 49th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics: Human language technologies-volume 1 (pp. 379-388). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Alhadi, A. C., Gottron, T., & Staab, S. (2011). Exploring user purpose writing single tweets. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Web Science. Koblenz, Germany: ACM Digital Library
Anderson, A., Huttenlocher, D., Kleinberg, J., & Leskovec, J. (2012, February). Effects of user similarity in social media. In Proceedings of the fifth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining (pp. 703-712). ACM.
Antin, J., & Churchill, E. F. (2011). Badges in social media: A social psychological perspective. In CHI 2011 Gamification Workshop Proceedings (Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2011).
Attardo, S. (1994). Linguistic theories of humor (Vol. 1). Walter de Gruyter.
Bhat, S., & Reddy, S. K. (1998). Symbolic and functional positioning of brands. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 15(1), 32-43.
Bauckhage, C. (2011, May). Insights into Internet Memes. In ICWSM.
Blog.Twitter.Com (2015). Removing the 140-character limit from Direct Messages. Retrieved from https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/removing-the-140-character-limit-from-direct-messages.html
Blumler, J. G., & Katz, E. (1974). The Uses of Mass Communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Burns, H. (2014). Yik Yak app stirring up chatter on college campuses. USA Today. Retrieved from https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/personal/2014/03/07/yik-yak-college-students/6124405/
Catanescu, C., & Tom, G. (2001). Types of humor in television and magazine advertising. Review of Business-Saint Johns University,22(1), 92-95.
Chew, C., & Eysenbach, G. (2010). Pandemics in the age of Twitter: Content analysis of tweets during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. PloS one, 5(11), e14118.
Courtois, C., & D'heer, E. (2012, July). Second screen applications and tablet users: constellation, awareness, experience, and interest. In Proceedings of the 10th European conference on Interactive tv and video (pp. 153-156). ACM.
Dann, S. (2010). Twitter content classification. First Monday, 15(12). doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v15i12.2745
DiMicco, J., Millen, D. R., Geyer, W., Dugan, C., Brownholtz, B., & Muller, M. (2008, November). Motivations for social networking at work. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 711-720). ACM.
Eighmey, J., & McCord, L. (1998). Adding value in the information age: Uses and gratifications of sites on the World Wide Web. Journal of Business Research, 41(3), 187-194.
Flamson, T., & Barrett, H. C. (2008). The encryption theory of humor: A knowledge-based mechanism of honest signaling. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 6(4), 261-281.
Flamson, T. J., & Bryant, G. A. (2013). Signals of humor. Developments in Linguistic Humour Theory, 1, 49.
Friedman, R. S., Förster, J., &Denzler, M. (2007). Interactive effects of mood and task framing on creative generation. Creativity Research Journal, 19(2-3), 141-162.
Greene, J. A., Choudhry, N. K., Kilabuk, E., & Shrank, W. H. (2011). Online social networking by patients with diabetes: a qualitative evaluation of communication with Facebook. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 26(3), 287-292.
Green, N., Harper, R. H., Murtagh, G., & Cooper, G. (2001). Configuring the mobile user: sociological and industry views. Personal and Ubiquitous computing, 5(2), 146-156.
Greengross, G., & Miller, G. F. (2009). The Big Five personality traits of professional comedians compared to amateur comedians, comedy writers, and college students. Personality and Individual Differences, 47(2), 79-83.
Hartshorne, E. Y. (1943). Undergraduate society and the college culture. American Sociological Review, 321-332.
Helitzer, M., & Shatz, M. (2005). Comedy writing secrets. Writer's Digest Books.
Holt, J., & Sanson, K. (Eds.). (2013). Connected Viewing: Selling, Sharing, and Streaming Media in a Digital Age: Selling, Streaming, & Sharing Media in the Digital Age. Routledge.
Holzer, A., Govaerts, S., Ondrus, J., Vozniuk, A., Rigaud, D., Garbinato, B., & Gillet, D. (2013). Speakup–a mobile app facilitating audience interaction. In Advances in Web-Based Learning–ICWL 2013 (pp. 11-20). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Hummon, D. M. (1994). College slang revisited: Language, culture, and undergraduate life. The Journal of Higher Education, 65(1), 75-98. doi:10.2307/2943878
Katz, E., Blumler, J. G., & Gurevitch, M. (1973). Uses and gratifications research. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 37(4), 509-523.
Kim, J., & Lee, J. E. R. (2011). The Facebook paths to happiness: Effects of the number of Facebook friends and self-presentation on subjective well-being. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 14(6), 359-364.
Kim, Y., Sohn, D., & Choi, S. M. (2011). Cultural difference in motivations for using social network sites: A comparative study of American and Korean college students. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(1), 365-372.
Klink, M. L. (2010). Laugh out loud in real life: Women's humor and fan identity (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
Kolb, D. A. (2014). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. FT Press.
Krämer, N. C., & Winter, S. (2008). Impression management 2.0: The relationship of self-esteem, extraversion, self-efficacy, and self-presentation within social networking sites. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 20(3), 106.
Kuipers, G. (2006). The social construction of digital danger: debating, defusing and inflating the moral dangers of online humor and pornography in the Netherlands and the United States. New Media & Society, 8(3), 379-400.
Kwak, H., Lee, C., Park, H., & Moon, S. (2010, April). What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?. In Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web (pp. 591-600). ACM.
Lakkaraju, H., McAuley, J. J., &Leskovec, J. (2013, June). What's in a Name? Understanding the Interplay between Titles, Content, and Communities in Social Media. In ICWSM.
Lampos, V. (2012). On voting intentions inference from Twitter content: A case study on UK 2010 General Election. arXiv preprint arXiv:1204.0423.
Lee, E.-J., & Oh, S. Y. (2013). Seek and you shall find? How need for orientation moderates knowledge gain from Twitter use. Journal of Communication, 63(4), 745-765.
Levi, A. E., & Bauer, B. W. (2010). U.S. Patent No. 7,664,516. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Liu, S. (2012). The Most Popular Thing You’ve Probably Never Heard of. www.writingandrhetoric.cah.ucf.edu/stylus/files/2_1/stylus2_1-liu.pdf. Accessed at 2.3.2012
Lochrie, M., &Coulton, P. (2011, November). Mobile phones as second screen for TV, enabling inter-audience interaction. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (p. 73). ACM.
Mangold, W. G., & Faulds, D. J. (2009). Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix. Business Horizons, 52(4), 357-365.
Mersey, R. D., Malthouse, E. C., & Calder, B. J. (2010). Engagement with online media. Journal of Media Business Studies, 7(2).
Mills, R. (2011). “Researching social news – is reddit.com a mouthpiece for the ‘hive mind’ or a collective intelligence approach to information overload?” Paper presented at ETHICOMP 2011, Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University
Norrick, N. R. (1989). Intertextuality in humor. Humor-International Journal of Humor Research, 2(2), 117-140.
Page, R. E. (2013). Stories and social media: Identities and interaction. Routledge.
Park, N., & Lee, S. (2014). College students' motivations for Facebook use and psychological outcomes. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 58(4), 601-620.
Raacke, J., & Bonds-Raacke, J. (2008). MySpace and Facebook: Applying the uses and gratifications theory to exploring friend-networking sites. Cyberpsychology& behavior, 11(2), 169-174.
Ramoz-Leslie, N. J. (2011). Doin'it for the Lulz: a contemporary analysis of internet humor: A thesis in sociology (master’s thesis). Whiteman College, Walla Walla, WA, USA.
Reyes, A., Rosso, P., & Buscaldi, D. (2012). From humor recognition to irony detection: The figurative language of social media. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 74, 1-12.
Sanderson, B., & Rigby, M. (2013). We’ve Reddit, have you? What librarians can learn from a site full of memes. College & Research Libraries News, 74(10), 518-521.
Seidman, G. (2013). Self-presentation and belonging on Facebook: How personality influences social media use and motivations. Personality and Individual Differences, 54(3), 402-407.
Shao, G. (2009). Understanding the appeal of user-generated media: a uses and gratification perspective. Internet Research, 19(1), 7-25.
Shifman, L. (2007). Humor in the age of digital reproduction: Continuity and change in Internet-based comic texts. International Journal of Communication,1(1), 23.
Silius, K., Miilumaki, T., Huhtamaki, J., Tebest, T., Merilainen, J., &Pohjolainen, S. (2010). Students' motivations for social media enhanced studying and learning. Knowledge Management & E-Learning: An International Journal (KM&EL), 2(1), 51-67.
Strauss, W., Howe, N., & Markiewicz, P. G. (2006). Millennials and the pop culture: Strategies for a new generation of consumers in music, movies, television, the Internet, and video games. LifeCourse Associates.
Tsekleves, E., Cruickshank, L., Hill, A., Kondo, K., & Whitham, R. (2007, December). Interacting with digital media at home via a second screen. In Multimedia Workshops, 2007. ISMW'07. Ninth IEEE International Symposium on (pp. 201-206). IEEE.
Wang, G., Wang, B., Wang, T., Nika, A., Zheng, H., & Zhao, B. Y. (2014, November). Whispers in the dark: analysis of an anonymous social network. In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference (pp. 137-150). ACM.
Wasike, B. S. (2011). Framing social news sites: An analysis of the top ranked stories on Reddit and Digg. Southwestern Mass Communication Journal, 27(1).
Westlund, O. (2013). Mobile news: a review and model of journalism in an age of mobile media. Digital Journalism, 1(1), 6-26.
Winnick, C. (1976). The social contexts of humor. Journal of Communication,26(3), 124-128.
Wolak, J., & Finkelhor, D. (2011). Sexting: A typology. In Crimes against Children Research.
Yik Yak investment data drawn from: http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/14/yik-yak-is-close-to-closing-on-roughly-75-million/
Yip, J. A., & Martin, R. A. (2006). Sense of humor, emotional intelligence, and social competence. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(6), 1202-1208.
Zhao, W. X., Jiang, J., He, J., Song, Y., Achananuparp, P., Lim, E. P., & Li, X. (2011, June). Topical keyphrase extraction from twitter. In Proceedings of the 49th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics: Human language technologies-volume 1 (pp. 379-388). Association for Computational Linguistics.
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