Last Monday, Oberlin student representatives from the social media application Fizz distributed donuts in Wilder Hall, Stevenson Hall, and outside of King Building in exchange for pledges to download the application.

Other students received messages from Fizz marketing analysts on LinkedIn prior to the app’s arrival on campus, offering them positions as content moderators on the app at a rate of $500 per month, like College second-year Gina Thompson, who ignored the offer she received.

“When they tried to recruit me, I ignored it as spam since we’ve had issues with job offer phishing emails recently,” Thompson wrote in an email to the Review.

Thompson was also skeptical about the details of the offer.

“Usually when a company offers you a good amount of money to be a spokesperson there is some kind of catch, so I didn’t pursue the offer,” Thompson wrote.

For students who elected to accept the moderator position, Fizz presented them with a contract that includes a non- disclosure agreement, clauses regarding compensation, and a waiver of the right to legal action against Fizz.

“Consultant shall maintain full confidentiality about role and responsibilities at Fizz,” a December 2022 version of the contract reads. “In addition to the Confidential Information written in Section 5 of this agreement, Consultant shall not disclose: a. Title of role or affiliation to Fizz on any public social media site (e.g. LinkedIn) at any time. b. Role of generating content on any public social media site (e.g. LinkedIn) at any time.”

Fizz, founded in 2021 at Stanford University, is a social media platform similar to YikYak, which has been a popular app on campus for the past few years. Both applications share the same basic functionality — users make anonymous posts that are then
up or downvoted by fellow users.

However, Fizz requires that users sign up via their college email accounts, while YikYak is open to everyone based on geographic location. Requiring a college email is similar to the model Facebook first followed on college campuses.

Some, like College second-year Faye Carter, are suspicious of this reliance on an email address, as well as the app at large.

“It just seems like YikYak but sketchier,” Carter said. “And I heard something about you having to put your school email on it, which I don’t like.”

According to public statements by the Fizz development and marketing teams, the app is looking to expand into all colleges across the U.S., and Oberlin is one of the first 1,000 campuses on which the app has been rolled out.

In the week following the app’s arrival on campus, Thompson has not found Fizz to stand out amongst other social media applications that already exist.

“The app isn’t really filling a gap in the market,” Thompson wrote. “It’s mostly just YikYak with a bit more flexibility of types of posts. I personally don’t use it much, but also don’t use YikYak much, so I can’t really pass judgment on which I prefer. I’m mostly just watching to see what happens since this whole situation has been odd to me.”

Carter was particularly put off by Fizz’s marketing strategy — representatives of the app placed an advertisement for its Oberlin charter under the door of her South Hall dorm room.

“I thought it was weird that I got something at my door advertising it, and I don’t know if that happened to everybody, but I definitely noticed that for people in my hall,” Carter said. “I went out in the middle of the night one time and there’s these little postcards advertising Fizz, right by everyone’s door. But when I woke up in the morning…I left mine out on the floor – I was like, ‘I’ll just get it in the morning.’ But when I woke up, it was under my door in my room.”

Carter is also skeptical of Fizz’s commitment to data security.

“It just seems like another app that’s sort of meant to steal your data and I don’t know, just everything about it seems extremely sketchy to me,” Carter said.

According to Fizz’s Security Practices webpage, the company follows “industry-standard security protocols.”

“First, all interactions between Fizz users, content, and our systems are done using unique and anonymized account identifiers,” the webpage reads. “We’ve ensured that at no point can Fizz users, moderators, or our launch teams see another user’s Personal Identifiable Information. PII on Fizz is stored in a separate secure database, which is only accessible by Fizz administrators.”