'Fizz' Gaining Traction: Is it Yik Yak's Foe or a Shining New Face?

The Fizz logo when you are booting up the app. Photo by Kyle Esoian ‘25.

Fizz, the new social media app that is starting to gain traction on Marist’s campus, is being met with mixed reactions due to its similarity to the already prominent Yik Yak.

Fizz was created in 2020 by Stanford University dropouts Teddy Soloman and Ashton Cofer. They started it not only as a way for students to converse about a variety of different topics, like confessions, jokes, and events on campus, but also to help students who feel isolated and lonely on campus. 

Fizz has finally hit the Marist campus, exclusively for Marist students. This is the same for Fizz on any other college campus.

The app is basically Yik Yak, with the same format, however there are way more features. These upgrades include the use of photos on your posts, the ability to create polls, the option to direct message others and signing up using your school email address.

Getting kicked off the app by a moderator means you can't rejoin in the future. 

Fizz has become more and more popular on a multitude of campuses throughout the U.S., the main reason relating to how it deals with moderation.

“The biggest differentiating factor is the way that we do moderation,” says Solomon.

Each campus has a specific number of moderators who get paid to make sure that posts are hateful, disparaging, or dangerous towards other students or to the person posting it themselves.

“Posts are removed within less than a minute on average, across all of our communities. We’re able to mute banned users, and if you’re banned from the community, you’re not coming back in, because you don’t have another school email address that you can put in,” says Solomon.

When it comes to Fizz at Marist, all of this applies. If you see a flyer or an advertisement for Fizz anywhere on campus, it is probably because there are people being paid to advertise and get people to download it. 

“To be a moderator on Fizz, I have to make a certain amount of posts a day to bring attention to it, but I get paid $500 a month” one sophomore moderator at Marist says.

He continued and explained what his position as a moderator entails.

“When you post, before you submit, it says ‘no bullying, no personal info, no hate speech, no misinformation, no spam, and no illegal content.’ Anything that falls under those categories, I get rid of.”

He further says “And then that content gets sent to all the other moderators, and it has to get approved by two or three other moderators before it gets taken down.”

Although Fizz is currently less popular than Yik Yak, which is still alive and well, many students believe that Fizz should overtake Yik Yak as the primary social media discussion app at Marist.

Zach Mendelson 25’ says, “I think Fizz is a lot more involved with the school's atmosphere than Yik Yak. I think Fizz affects and can affect Marist in a positive and fun manner, while generating money, which college students historically always need.”

Although the majority of Marist students seem to agree that Fizz is not only engaging and fun, but a safe space for students, a lot of students who think Fizz needs to improve bring up one thing: promotion. 

Most students believe that Fizz is a great app, but agree that it is relatively unknown to students, which is why on campuses where Fizz is present, students are getting paid to push it. 

“It [Fizz] has to catch traction just like any other app, like Instagram, or Facebook, or TikTok. It’s honestly just a chance, and I think that students should give Fizz that chance,” says a sophomore moderator.