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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.
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
I suspect that their plan to move away from their core business is totally doomed; but I would also suspect that they came up with that plan because their core business was totally doomed(and they couldn't find some idiot to aquire them for silly amounts of money, maybe Yahoo was busy when the called...).
The world is pretty full of message boards and chat apps; and the combination of proximity filtering and 'anonymity' produces a really, really, low-value environment. Because of the geographic boundaries, it's useless for any of the 'connecting with other enthusiasts of my weird and potentially embarassing hobby/fetish/etc' applications of anonymity, since you can only interact with people in a fairly small area around you; but since it purports to be anonymous(obviously, an application running on your phone with location data mandatory isn't anonymous at all from the perspective of the company operating the service) it mostly attracted the...high quality comments... that people wanted to make about each other; but weren't willing to say to your face.
Shockingly, people's appetite for that appears to be limited; and the most enthusiastic users are the people most likely to drive the rest of the users away and generate enough unpleasant stories to spook potential advertisers.