Over the last few weeks, a new way to anonymously express your innermost thoughts and feelings—or make memes about the infamous puppy play of President Michael Roth ’78 and confess to accidentally using your roommate’s matching vibrator—has spread across the University. Fizz, an anonymous, Reddit-like platform, has become ubiquitous among first-years at the University through persistent marketing and the promise of community through viral posts.

The app, which was developed at Stanford in 2020, has since spread to over 80 campuses and raised over $25 million of venture capital funding. Though it follows in the footsteps of countless apps vying for a market share on college campuses, Fizz aims to bring something new to the table.

Along with the ability to post anonymously, users can share pictures, climb up a leaderboard by accumulating “karma” from upvotes, and send direct messages to other users on the app. It even includes meme templates to aid users in captioning posts and awards for those who engage with the community.

Fizz’s platform lends itself to a variety of posts, from inside jokes about the “Summies lady” to sharing friend drama and complaining about professors. One person who goes by the Fizz username @copyandpastewescokid and formerly occupied fifth place on the leaderboard loves to post memes.

“One of my favorite posts that I’ve made was a meme saying: ‘my fellow Fizzlers, let’s be real,’” @copyandpastewescokid said. “Then there’s a graph looking at peoples’ sense of power. The joke is that people [on Fizz] get the most power from upvotes on Fizz. I thought it was very self-referential and very funny.”

To many Fizz users, the app is more than just a platform for memes and jokes, offering a space where students can exchange ideas—a community that expands beyond the physical realm of campus.

“There are sometimes really, really sweet moments where somebody will ask for advice, or share something that happened to them that’s a little bit more personal,” @copyandpastewescokid said. “People will reach out to this person or comment on their posts.”

For @copyandpastewescokid, Fizz differs from other forms of social media by allowing people to care much less about how they represent themselves online.

“People [on Fizz] are much more heavily focused on what they’re posting, rather than how they present themselves,” @copyandpastewescokid continued. “I think so much of social media right now is, ‘I’m on Instagram and taking a picture. It’s me.’ What’s interesting about [Fizz] is it puts a lot of the emphasis just on the content.”

Memes are not the only type of content Fizz brings to the table. Odin Marin ’27 uses Fizz as a way of knowing and understanding what’s happening around campus.

“For example, last night, I was studying in the library, and I got a text from my roommate that said, ‘Bro, there are fire trucks outside of Bennet right now,’” Marin said.

Marin was shocked and wanted to know more about the situation, but his roommate stopped responding to his urgent messages. In order to learn what actually was going on in Bennet, he opened Fizz and saw many pictures and posts explaining the situation at Bennet.

“Aside from it being very entertaining, it’s actually become a pretty good real-time news feed of what’s happening on campus,” Marin said. “On a rainy day, it also provides weather updates. If I’m curious how wet the bottom of Foss is, I can look at Fizz and if there are jokes about it being wet, I know to avoid walking around there.”

Fizz also added a lost-and-found feature, including several pictures of stray AirPods in the feed, which has aided many students in finding items that have been temporarily lost on campus. Angelina Kunitskaia ’27 was able to use the lost-and-found feature to find her phone.

“When I lost my phone at a party, my friends immediately posted on Fizz about it with the lost and found tag,” Kunitskaia said. “Many people upvoted it to make this post popular, and the guy who had picked it up came across the post. Eventually, I got it back!”

Fizz has grown in popularity, in part, through other social media platforms, with some students advertising the app online. The app even employs a student at the University, Jake Maskara ’27, as a social media manager who runs the promotional Instagram account for Fizz at Wesleyan, @fizzwesleyan. His weekly responsibilities include creating a combination of story posts and feed posts throughout each week, choosing a few Fizzes to amplify on Instagram.

“What they recommended [in my job training] was going to the Wesleyan class of 2027 Instagram page, or finding students who had put ‘Wesleyan’ in their bios, and following those people and seeing if they will follow you back,” Maskara said.

Maskara explained that the app predominantly serves first-years because of their unique needs as they try to build community at Wesleyan.

“It is very freshmen heavy,” Maskara continued. “Because the people who have been here have other ways [of connecting], they know each other already. A lot of the freshman demographic hasn’t done that stuff.”

Even though Fizz is largely dominated by first-years, it still stands as a good representation of the University student body, according to Maskara.

“On the polls, people will ask, ‘Just curious, what gender are you?’” Maskara said. “They’ll ask about stuff like sexuality, and other things, like demographic areas. Fizz seems to be…a really good representation of the Wesleyan community and especially the freshman community.”

When asked whether the anonymity feature of Fizz helps to share thoughts otherwise left unsaid, even in social settings, Maskara said it was part of Fizz’s appeal.

“I’ve seen some wild stuff there,” Maskara said. “I’ve posted some wild stuff on there. You know, it’s fun…. It’s a cool way to interact with people, by [direct] messaging them and then talking to them. Then maybe they feel comfortable sharing who they are, or maybe they don’t, but either way, the anonymous part helps you to be more creative, more bold, or even more controversial about what you’re gonna say.”

Though Fizz and its social media managers have been steadily advertising around campus and online, the app’s largest spike in popularity at the University occurred through word of mouth after a shocking comment, detailing sexual acts that happened in and around the Memorial Chapel, was posted.

However, Fizz’s tireless efforts to recruit new users and even its salacious content have not been enough to lure most of the University’s returning students onto the app. Many returning students have never even heard of the new app.

And for the juniors and seniors who know what the app is, even Fizz’s promise of free food cannot get rid of their bad memories from other popular anonymous platforms at the University.

“It takes a lot for me to turn down a free donut at Usdan,” Noah Frato-Sweeney ’24 wrote in a message to The Argus. “When I found out I had to download a cheap YikYak knockoff to get the donut, I apologized to my taste buds and left as fast as I could.”

Frato-Sweeney is not alone in feeling this way about YikYak, an app very similar to Fizz that allows college students to connect with others posting within a five-mile radius.

“I used YikYak as a freshman,” Shanti Hinkin ’26 reflected. “In my mind, everyone was on that app. I used it sort of like a local Twitter.”

YikYak grew in popularity at the University in the fall of 2021, with many quickly learning that the app, which advertised itself as a “radically private network,” isn’t actually as anonymous as it may seem.

Several returning students described YikYak users posting names in code in order to avoid their posts being taken down, exploiting a loophole in the site’s anonymity to expose or attack other students.

“I remember using YikYak,” Willow Saxon ’25 remembered. “And I remember it being problematic sometimes. I knew some people whose feelings got hurt. People would spell names with numbers and symbols, and kind of dox people. I wasn’t a fan of it.”

While Fizz has dodged this particular criticism so far, it’s just one more app in a series of web pages and platforms throughout the 21st century that have offered anonymous connection, and maybe a few laughs at others’ expense. Over and over, sites like these have gotten messy, especially among college kids.

“[Fizz] sounds like YikYak but with more dangerous capabilities,” Saxon said.

Aside from concerns about enabling cyberbullying, apps like Fizz have attracted skepticism for their brief venture capital-fueled tenure and then subsequent downfall, especially on college campuses.

“It seems like progressively, there’s always a new app that’s focused on gossip,” Hinkin said. “I think it’s a little bit lame, and it’s something that each generation ages out of and then that each generation reinvents.”

Historically, criticism of buzzy online platforms’ relentless life cycle, and their presence at American colleges is nothing new. According to an Argus article entitled “Not Forgotten: What Happened to the WesACB?” the Wesleyan Anonymous Confession Board (WesACB) survived at the University until 2015, despite allegations of slut-shaming and racial slurs on the platform.  

All the way back in 2004, in an Argus article titled “Thefacebook.com comes to Wesleyan,” students expressed similar misgivings about a new site: The Facebook. 

“[The Facebook] seems to be basically another Friendster clone, trying to grow as fast as possible without any real appreciation for what makes a place like Wesleyan unique,” Dan Stillman ’04 said in the 2004 article.

While it remains to be seen whether Fizz joins the likes of WesACB and the more short-lived Friendster or achieves the longevity of Facebook, the app as a cultural phenomenon will likely make an impression, at least among its loyal first-year followers.

“Fizz kind of started when we started,” Maskara said. “Fizz really only showed up at Wesleyan, maybe our second week here. So we were new, Fizz was new.”

Ella Henn can be reached at ehenn@wesleyan.edu. 

Lily Ahluwalia can be reached at lalhuwalia@wesleyan.edu.

Miles Craven can be reached at mcraven@wesleyan.edu.

Janhavi Munde can be reached at jmunde@wesleyan.edu.