Teens are Gassing each other up

Gas, a new teen-focused social app, is taking America by storm. It's currently the most popular free app in the App Store despite only being available in 12 states, per the WSJ, which reports the company has amassed 500,000+ downloads since launching in late August.

🏫📱 How does it work?... Teens are asked to disclose their high school when signing up. Once logged on, Gas asks multiple-choice questions restricted to classmates, featuring yearbook-style queries like "the most beautiful person you have ever met," or the classmate who's "never afraid of getting in trouble."

• Students selected in the polls receive "flames" (notifications) signaling they were chosen. All answers are anonymous by default, with the only identifiers being gender and grade.
• Users can make in-app purchases to find out the names of people who voted for them, or to keep their own name hidden in poll results.

🌐 Zoom out: Gas isn't the first youth-focused anonymous social app to burst onto the scene. YikYak, a social media app founded in 2013 that allowed users to create anonymous, localized posts, was downloaded millions of times, propelling it to a ~$400 million valuation… before the app was forced to shut down in April 2017 after a series of campus controversies involving bullying and racist threats. (Though as of March 2022, the Yak is bak.)