By Isabella Darcy
Opinions Editor
The College’s Roar app has potential. With useful features like access to a complete class schedule, a campus event calendar and alerts for security announcements, the app has the means to be popular and productive.
Most students are encouraged to download the Roar app during their transition into the College. It is advertised as a resource for academics, extracurriculars and community. Unfortunately, because of the way that some folks use the app, what could have been an asset has turned into an irrelevant social-media-like platform.
Posts on the Roar app student feed feature are responsible for the app’s digression. Frequent inapt posts have turned the student feed into an abyss of nonsense. This makes the feature messy and hard to frequent. Bloggers, meme posters and sellers take up so much space on the student feed that when someone posts something relevant to the College, it is often lost in between the chaos.
Using an app that is meant to help students as a platform for trivial posts is inappropriate. Folks should only use the Roar app as a resource, because it becomes too difficult to frequent when it is flooded with irrelevant posts.
The irrelevant posts are not just taking over the student feed. They are also the predominant type of notification that I receive from the Roar app. My phone is constantly buzzing with notifications alerting me to someone's diary-entry-like post that has no significance to me or the College.
I cannot recall a single time that I received a notification about something school related from the Roar app. I can, however, confidently say that I receive at least one unimportant notification coming from the student feed every day.
Senior biomedical engineering major Sebastian Winter pointed out another bothersome aspect of Roar app notifications.
“The Roar app is annoying because you get notifications on your home screen and you can’t clear them off. Currently, I have 257 notifications and I can’t clear them all,” Winter said.
Two hundred fifty-seven is telling in regards to how often the Roar app sends notifications.
“I don’t want to receive notifications that are pointless,” Winter said.
Folks should stop using the Roar app like social media. If a student has a meme, thought or listing that they feel needs to be posted online, then they should use Fizz Social or Yik Yak rather than the Roar app.
Fizz Social and Yik Yak are both social networking apps that connect folks who attend the same College to one another. Thus, students at the College can reach the same audience on Fizz Social and Yik Yak as they do on the Roar app.
If everyone stopped using the Roar app like social media and utilized it solely as the resource that it is, then I would use it more often.
