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Yik Yak Lays Off 60 Percent of Employees As Growth Collapses (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Yik Yak has laid off 60 percent of employees amid a downturn in the app's growth prospects, The Verge has learned. The three-year-old anonymous social network has raised $73.5 million from top-tier investors on the promise that its young, college-age network of users could one day build a company to rival Facebook. But the challenge of growing its community while moving gradually away from anonymity has so far proven to be more than the company could muster. Employees who were affected were informed of the layoffs Thursday morning, sources told The Verge. Yik Yak employed about 50 people, and now only about 20 remain, the company said. The community, marketing, design, and product teams were all deeply affected, one source said. Atlanta-based Yik Yak was founded in 2014 by Furman University students Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington. The app updated the concept of dorm newsletters for the mobile era, letting anyone post comments about school, their campus, or life in general. The fact that comments were anonymous initially helped the app grow, as it encouraged more candid forms of sharing than students might otherwise post on Facebook or Instagram.
Well, at least someone made money. Been there, done that ("that" as in I got ripped off by assholes).
Last time I used Yik Yak, about a year ago, 3/4 of the posts were variations of either "I'm horny", "yo that blonde/brunette who works at [store] is hot", or "why is this place so slow"?
They Yakked up 3/5 of their staff.
Of course this is the first I've heard of them. That they market to college kids is likely why. I dropped out of college in 1999 to go into tech.
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And nothing of value was lost.
... and Halliburton, but mostly the blipverts.
People trusted the app up until they started going after and exposing so called "anonymous" users...
Not YikYak! What am I going to do now?
Ohh Sorry Yik Yak, I thought it was talking about a knock off breath mint candy....
But seriously... I have no clue what the damn app is, even visiting the page... wtf is a 'herd' ?
*Edit before posting*: So I realized the biggest issue with the damn site... it uses that "web 3.0" nonsense design philosophy where the top of the page is nothing but a picture, and so I had no clue wtf it was talking about... because the page IMHO purposely hides relevant information that ACTUALLY explains what it is...
Apparently a (and I could be wrong) a super local social media app, that allows you to be a hipster knowing what is going on in the coffee shop 3 blocks down from you... "so you can know about it before it is 'cool' ".... or something...
Edit 2: captcha is 'readable' ...catcha gods love irony today
Is that something like a blindfolded vision test?
who's up next?
That sounds a plan as a smart as youtube moving away from videos or sourceforge/github wanting to move away from "that open source thing".
Harassment isn't profitable, and even Trump will fail because of such bad habits.
And I care because?......
You say that like you're proud to have dropped out.
As a previously avid user (great shitposting app)
meh.
They gimped anonymity a while back anyway and people fled.
They wanted more data to sell, basically.
What is wrong with the world that yet-another-chat-app gets $73M to burn across 50 people but real small businesses doing real work with real things can barely get approved for a credit card?
Are you serious? Yeah, those are totally legitimate names.
These companies have the potential to make billions with only a handful of employees. That's where the ruling class is putting all their chips. They're trying to find ways to make a ton of money without all those pesky employees getting in the way with their wages and benefits and pensions. When one out of a hundred of these companies takes off it pays for all the rest of the failures (which are tax write offs anyway)
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I work at a very large major university and YikYak was pretty popular here before they forced "handles" and profiles on everyone.
It wasn't just "shitposting"- most of the shitposting occurred AFTER they enforced handles with the worst posters making their profile pics pepe memes and taking names like "Isuckfatchoades" and the like.
Before that YikYak on campus was:
10% - "lol i'm horny who wants to hook up"/"man that chick/dude is hot"
10% - Discussing the latest controversy du jour on campus
10% - Trolling/Shitposting
30% - Joking about class/college stuff like finals/classes
40% - Students and Staff/Faculty giving people a heads up when stuff happens on campus; YikYak was great for finding out about traffic jams/class cancellations/etc. It was better at crime alerts than the text alert system the uni spent a shitload of money on after all the college campus shootings.
There was also a guy who was really awesome who would give away gift cards over YikYak using its older anonymous comment system where each response was given a color coded symbol unique to each poster in the topic. "First person with an orange canoe" or whatever gets a card. They fucked that up and the guy gave up doing the giveaways.
Now it's dead basically with the same 4-5 shitposters with stupid pepe/4chan avatars spamming garbage because no one feels safe posting anything actually candid or honest because even with handles not requiring real info- everyone knowing who you are as a regular posters gives people a pattern of activity that even on a huge campus like ours can let creepy stalker people find you (or if you express unpopular opinions about say...faculty and staff, this could cause you academic problems).
So basically they had an interesting app and strangled it in the crib because data mining.
Yik Yak had one good use. When testing out if XPrivacy was working, if I had a different number of yak points than I had previously, I knew the snooping algorithm with the app has been stopped. It is pretty interesting how much data the app would slurp up to fingerprint a phone. It would ask for almost everything, and even look at local and public IP addresses to find who you were.
Of course, what comments get voted up and what didn't was amusing as well. If one set their location to be near a jail and mentioned how cruddy the food is at a certain address, the comment would be removed (not voted down, removed.) If one made a comment how shitty the blokes were at SXSW [1] after the event, you get voted off in seconds. Make a comment about the local overpriced hamburger joint that is trendy, gone. Make a comment how bicycles should have right of way everywhere, you now got a +250 post. Oddly enough, a political post like, "Are you ready for Hillary?" gets smacked off the charts in record time.
Once they started demanding a phone number and handles, there isn't any real point. No anonymity with that, and one might as well just comment somewhere else.
Yik Yak was interesting when one could be confident that anonymity was protected. However, when the app demanded every permission under the sun and would do tons of nasty stuff to fingerprint a device, while demanding personal info and phone numbers... it became not worth it. The cool thing about the app was the anonyminity, and when that was taken away, Yik Yak was trying to compete with FB and Twitter on FB/Twitter's own turf... which meant Yik Yak was pretty much hosed from that point on.
[1]: SXSW is a music festival held in the "Beers, Steers & Queers" state, where it costs $1000 just to get a ticket for venues, not to mention grossly inflated prices for hotel, parking, and whatnot.
I tried YikYak and I still fire it up maybe once a week - to post content from the perspective of a bear, which is kind of fun. I raided some lady's bird feeder last week and told everyone all about it.
But I live out in a semi-rural area. One of YikYak's problems is that it only has content if you're near other people that post content. I, myself, posting maybe once a week, am about 25% of the content in my area. The other 70% is people looking for marijuana or sex, with the remaining 5% of people talking about a crazy bear.
So, it's not a compelling product for a vast section of America. If you live in a city? Cool, great idea, nice product. Out where I am, which is most of America? Not really useful.
Love sees no species.
A friend of mine used to work there until yesterday. He said they closed the place down, more like 95% layoffs. It's gone.
Is it just me or does the founders names sound like characters from a bad 80s frat movie? (Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington)
Really - that's your defense?
Just went there after hearing about it for the first time. What a vapid, sad little world. Just post after post of people talking about being hungover, wanting sex or a burger, etc. Is this what our modern society is going to be? All anonymity and no humanity? No wonder everyone is depressed, being social animals with no social interaction outside of 140 characters.
They must have shit marketing because it seems like most people here have never heard of it.
" it encouraged more candid forms of sharing than students might otherwise post on Facebook or Instagram"
That'll make the top-10 list of understatements of the year.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.