What’s Going on in Oberlin Horny Chat? My Plunge into the Yik Yak Hookup Community
by Henry Boehm
Illustration by Maud Arpels
I’ve seen it. We’ve all seen it. Every time I opened Yik Yak, there it was staring back at me: “oberlin horny chat.” Hovering between 80 and 90 members, oberlin horny chat is by far the most popular group chat in the Oberlin community on Yik Yak, beating out runners-up “Langston/north,” “the con🎶,” and “Sneed” (ha ha). I’d always wondered what secrets oberlin horny chat held, but, I’ll admit it: I was scared. Scared at what I might see, and scared that any evidence of my existence—even an anonymous Yik Yak username—might reveal my sordid curiosity. But this Halloween, the scariest and horniest of holidays, my curiosity overcame my fear. How horny would oberlin horny chat really be?
The answer, it turns out, is very horny. The chat is extremely active, with dozens of messages posted every day from people interested in hooking up or sexting with other users. Hookup requests range from simple make outs to BDSM—even gloryholes find their way into the mix. Though the chat is used by all people of all genders and sexual orientations, the chat history seems to indicate that the most significant portion of its active user base are men looking to have sex with other men. Here is a good time to mention that oberlin horny chat is not the only group chat dedicated to hookups and sexting in the Oberlin Yik Yak community. Rather, it is the central node of a horny Yik Yak ecosystem consisting of more specialized group chats, including “k*nks chat” (40-50 members), “gay sex chat” (~20 members), and “Oberlin Noods” (~10 members).
But how do the hookups actually happen? DMing any Yik Yak user from a group chat is disabled, which might seem to render private communication impossible. However, oberlin horny chat users utilize an ingenious method to privately message and arrange IRL meetings with other users: They use a code phrases—usually an emoji—they solicit DMs from the Oberlin community page. Here’s a theoretical example: Turquoise_tuba sends the message “Looking for sex, posted 😈” in oberlin horny chat and publicly posts “😈” on the Oberlin community page. Mellow_mustard, also a member of Oberlin horny chat who is interested in sex, sees Turquoise_Tuba’s message in Oberlin horny chat. Mellow_mustard then searches for the public “😈” post on the community page and DMs Turquoise_Tuba from that post. And the rest is history! This method allows these public posts to evade attention, preserving a degree of discretion for the involved users and protecting their posts from being downvoted and potentially deleted if they reach -5 Yakarma. This method also reduces the risk that users will be banned for violating Yik Yak’s community guardrails, which prohibit “nudity, excessively sexual content, [and] sexual solicitation.”
But there was only so much I could learn about the Yik Yak hookup ecosystem by passively observing chat threads. To dig deeper, I decided to conduct interviews with active users via Yik Yak DMs. Out of 20 interview requests, I received eight responses which materialized into two partial interviews and four full interviews. Before I dig into the details of these interviews, I must precede with a disclaimer: I received not one, but two propositions to sext from two different respondents. I write this to asssure you, dear reader, that your humble interviewer did not compromise his journalistic objectivity (or his relationship with his girlfriend, for that matter), and respectfully declined these propositions. With that out the way, let’s jump in!
Three of my interviewees identified as gay men and one as a straight woman. Most had began using Yik Yak to hookup and sext within the past semester or two—including one respondent as recently as just a few days ago—but two said they had been using it for several years, since the pre-group chat era of Yik Yak. When I asked one how they would arrange hookups before the existence of group chats, they said that they would hornypost on the public community page. Another respondent said also they had hooked up with people through public hornyposts. It turns out that while the group chats streamline the process, public hornyposting has remained a viable, if less efficient, means of finding people to hookup with or sext.
My respondents provided a number of reasons for using Yik Yak as opposed to dating apps. Several said that Yik Yak simply has more users than dating apps, allowing them to “cast as wide a net as possible.” Another said that Yik Yak guaranteed that they could talk with people right on campus, rather than messaging people “50 miles away” through a dating app. But the most common reason by far was anonymity. Multiple respondents said it keeps their interactions fresh and exciting, though one complained that they would end up messaging the same people over and over again (even I inadvertantly sent an interview request to someone I’d already talked to). A few gave more specific reasons: One said anonymity allows them to “ask more about kinks and check if someone matches my freak” without incurring judgement from people who know their identity. Another said that they “learned that I’m not anyone’s type” on dating apps, so anonymity lets them avoid people who are “picky and superficial.”
My respondents claimed varying levels of success in meeting up with people they messaged on Yik Yak. The straight female respondent said they had met up with the majority of people they’d messaged—go figure. The gay male respondents were less successful: One said they had met up with just a single person from Yik Yak in several years. However, all of my respondents emphasized that their in-person meetups had generally been fun, positive experiences. “Yolo,” one repeated. “We’re young, we got hormones […] we wanna have fun.” Others said that “none of them have been weird or creepy people, and the sex itself has been great most of the time,” and that even though most of their messages “stay online […] from time to time [they] do meet up with people irl and it’s great.” One respondent even met their future boyfriend through an anonymous hornypost. Who says love is dead!
I realize that by writing this article, I am directing a decent amount of attention towards a community that thrives in anonymity and relative secrecy, and that I may be unintentionally opening up the floodgates to a whole host of Yik Yak trolls and pranksters. Therefore, I make this simple request to my readers: Leave oberlin horny chat and the rest alone! The Yik Yak hookup ecosystem is fragile, a delicately balanced online organism at constant risk of being banned, and I would feel somewhat responsible if my amateur ethnography played any part in its extinction. I also encourage you, loyal reader, to try to resist the knee-jerk impulse to pass judgement on the people described in this article. Of course, it may seem strange at first blush—but, really, is it all that out of the ordinary? How different is looking for hookups on Yik Yak from using an app like Tinder for the same purpose? Ultimately, they’re just people looking to get laid, and even find love, like the rest of us.
