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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.
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 Halliburton, but mostly the blipverts.
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?
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".
And I care because?......
Yep.
Enforcing cultlike behaviors is indeed a much better business model, as you create a safe space for their congregations.
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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Cry me a river. It is almost always the investors and founders who make money on bullsh*t IPO first-day trading, and the workers on the ground who were offered stock options that can't trade for months (or years) after IPO, that get screwed. Salaries usually don't include weeks of unpaid overtime.
Didn't stock options make way for RSU's a while back, after the saga on Enron, Worldcom, Tyco et al? What happened?
In the case of my employer, lots of people got heavily burned by options when they got taxed on their value at the grant time (during the tech bubble) followed by the stock plummeting and all the options being worthless. That was the beginning of the end for options for the rank and file.
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Not as much as Ms.Sarkeesan did in her several kickstarters to deliver 3 or so youtube videos taking several years to do so.
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.
" 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.
and the workers on the ground who were offered stock options that can't trade for months (or years) after IPO, that get screwed.
You don't know how IPOs work. When the company I worked for went IPO, any employees that had vested shares had the option to sell shares at the IPO price. Yes, there is a lockout period after the IPO, but anyone that had shares cold sell them if they wanted to. There were a lot more BMWs, Mercedes, and Audis at the company after our IPO, and it wasn't just the founders and executives.
WTB [sig], PST!!!