What's the deal with Fizz?

TL;DR: It’s Yik Yak.

If that explanation didn’t help, I guess I should start by explaining Yik Yak. Yik Yak was an anonymous social media app that originally operated from 2013 to 2017. Posts were only visible to users within a 5-mile radius, so it was mainly marketed to college students, who would be able to see all the posts made at their college. It was shut down in 2017 due to cyberbulling scandals, but in 2021, the financial services company Square bought the app and relaunched it. This is the version of Yik Yak that recent grads and current upperclassmen are most likely familiar with. But wait, it gets more confusing: in 2023, Yik Yak was bought by Sidechat, another app that does basically the same thing. “Yik Yak” as it exists today is really just a rebranded Sidechat.

Fizz is a third app that has basically the same functionality. Anonymous (or pseudonymous) users can post text, photos, videos, memes, and/or polls. From there, other users can FizzUp (upvote), FizzDown (downvote), save, comment, ReFizz (repost/retweet), direct-message the original poster, or share the post to other services.

When you open the app, you’ll see five tabs at the bottom of the screen:

• Home: The main feed. This is divided into a few sub-feeds:

  • Fizzin’: The top trending posts right now, as determined by Fizz’s algorithm. Comparable to Reddit’s “Hot” feed.

  • Top: The most-upvoted posts of the day, week, or all time. 

  • New: Every post in reverse-chronological order, for the true Fizz addicts like myself.

• Discover: Allows you to only look at posts with a specific tag. (More on tags below.)

• Marketplace (Beta): Where students sell crap they don’t need. This is most likely a key part of Fizz’s long-term business plan, since the app doesn’t have any ads (yet).

• Messages: Where you get ghosted.

• Profile: A bunch of stuff is packed in here:

  • Karma: If your posts/comments get upvoted, your karma goes up. If they get downvoted, your karma goes down. Capeesh? Caposh.

  • Leaderboard: Your place in the Fizz pecking order. Anyone with less karma than you is an imminent threat to your Fizz superiority; anyone with more karma needs to get a life.

  • Awards: There are 40 achievement-type thingies, which you can get from various Fizz activities (e.g. post a GIF, get 500 upvotes, post 10 days in a row). I’ve been stuck at 35/40 for an infuriatingly long time.

  • Activity: Where you get notifications if someone comments on your posts, or your post got a lot of upvotes, or the mods took your comment down because they didn’t get your joke.

  • Posts: All your posts, sortable by Most Recent or Most FizzUps.

  • Comments: Same thing but for your comments.

  • Saved: For bookmarking posts you want to come back to later. Use your bookmark powers wisely — or unwisely, it’s your choice.

Tags

When you create a post on Fizz, you can select a tag for it, and that’ll make it show up under a specific section in the Discover tab. Theoretically, this should have some bearing on the topic of the post, but in reality, people just tend to slap “Event” and “Crush” tags on their posts for no reason. Here are some posts you’ll see over and over for each tag:

  EVENT  

• “[Frat/sports team] throwing tn at [time]”

• Some random post that has nothing to do with events, not even a little bit

  POLL  

• Gender

• Class year

• Relationship status

• Rice purity score

• Political leaning (either Dem/GOP/Other or 5 levels from “very liberal” to “very conservative”)

• “Is it okay for a junior to get with a freshman?” (or some other grade gap)

• “Ladies, how small is too small?”

• “What the highest acceptable body count for a girl to have?”

• “🍒 or 🍑?”

• “Which dating app should I download?”

• “What app do you listen to music on?”

• Poll missing an obvious answer (e.g. “How old were you when you first tried nicotine?” but not giving a “never” option)

• OP makes simple math mistakes (e.g. having “<10” and “>10” options but no option for exactly 10)

  DM ME  

• “Need a man”/“Need a girl”

• “Who wanna hu” (I think you get the picture here)

• “Looking for a platonic cuddle buddy” (I have a theory that this is the same person every time, in which case I feel bad because they’re clearly very touch-deprived)

  PSA  

• “Wash your hands!!!”

  QUESTION  

• These are actual questions the vast majority of the time. The real problem is that most of the time, nobody bothers to answer OP’s question.

  CRUSH  

• Some random post that has nothing to do with crushes, not even a little bit

  CONFESSION  

• “I cheated on my bf/gf” (with a few dozen downvotes)

• “This guy with a 2.0 gpa tried to ask me for head, like bro use yours first”

  SHOUTOUT  

• Shoutouts to the janitors and Usdan staff (I’m not mad that these posts show up so often, they deserve every shoutout)

  DUB  

• “I got a [good grade] on my paper even though I started it 24 hours before it was due”

  RIP  

• “Eduroam sucks”

  MEME  

• “Hawk 1: [insert inane question here]Hawk 2: uhhh idk”(If the joke doesn’t make sense, say the second line aloud.)

  VIDEO  

• Something stolen from TikTok/Twitter/etc.

• The squirrels/groundhogs on campus

  LOST & FOUND  

• “Lost: my sanity”

• “I lost my virginity!!!”

• Lost AirPods. SO MANY lost AirPods. Also Wes IDs.

As a small community confined to an app, Fizz posts have limited exposure to the outside world. The main exception is on the official Fizz Wesleyan account on Instagram, which I guess posts the most popular or “best” posts on WesFizz. I don’t look at it much though, because I’ve already seen all of its posts when they went up on Fizz. 

Fizz’s initial popularity likely came from a major on-campus marketing effort in the fall of 2027. I’m talking booths at Usdan, sticking QR codes up around campus, refer-a-friend programs, etc. I found out about it from one of those QR codes; I downloaded the app and figured it would only last for a few weeks before everyone just forgot about it. But somehow, the user base remained relatively stable through the school year and the summer. It’s even managed to take off with the class of 2028 as well. I suspect this is due to more under-the-radar marketing techniques (read: spamming incoming frosh Instagrams with follow requests).

People have been saying that Fizz is dying pretty much ever since it launched. Is it dying now? Given that a post got 1,100 upvotes just this month, I’m inclined to say no. But Fizz has certainly changed since I joined it. Poll results show half the freshman class is on Fizz, so there are a lot more references to frosh WesCelebs that I just don’t get. Another change I’ve noticed this year is that a lot more athletes seem to be using the app. Last year, I thought of Fizz as a NARP app, but the biggest Fizz event of the year proved that’s not the case anymore. Yes, I’m talking about Rochefest. For those unaware, Rochefest was a Fountain party thrown by the hockey team on September 27, which was relentlessly promoted in hyperbolic terms leading up to the event. It got so out of hand that some Fizzers thought the whole thing was a prank, but no, it was a real (albeit lame) party. But the illuminating part was how many upvotes every Rochefest post got — clearly this a major Fizz-centric promotional effort by the hockey team. I was left feeling like this wasn’t my app anymore — though given that I’m a senior, it was never really my app in the first place.

One long-standing problem with Fizz has been karma farming — i.e. posts along the lines of “Upvote to do well on your exams.” This semester, however, it seems there has been an uptick in posts stolen word-for-word from other sites (Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, etc.) — or at least people are getting better at calling the stolen posts out. There’s also as much lying as there’s ever been.

Perhaps the most serious problem on the app has been the growing amount of drama and toxicity. For example, a few weeks ago, someone posted this:

This then spawned countless refizzes where users argued over whether the post was fatphobic. It almost made me miss the preceding week when every other post was about Rochefest.

Of course, Fizz’s mods are trying their best to keep the app healthy, but there’s a limit to how much they can do to control WesFizz’s culture. Actually, scratch that — not every mod is doing their best. Recently, at least one mod seems to be retaliating against me because I called them out for stealing one of their posts from Facebook:

reeaaal original.

Such activity does not go against Fizz’s rules, and many people have done similar callouts in the past. In fact, this started because someone refizzed the post with the message “find whatever tweet this is stolen from.” So naturally, I accepted that invitation and posted the Facebook screenshot.

However, I can’t tell you exactly how I captioned that screenshot when I posted it, because a few minutes later it was taken down by a moderator with the obviously bogus rationale that my post was “graphically sexual or gory.” And yes, the post did discuss sex, but it was no worse than other things that get posted on Fizz regularly. If my post was obscene, then so was the original stolen post. So then I posted the screenshot again but I censored everything subjective (while still making it obvious that the post was stolen) and it got taken down for the same reason. As I’m writing this, I just made a text-only post saying that the post was stolen. This one appears to still be up.

I guess this is a long-winded way of saying that Fizz has a fundamental problem with relying on student moderators rather than paying third-party mods — you end up with students getting irrationally protective of their made-up internet points and going on power trips whenever someone dares to question them.  And that is why I have deleted Fizz once and for all. Just kidding — I redownloaded it today.