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.

Comments

So.... Yik Yakked?

[networkBoy]

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.

Re:So.... Yik Yakked?

[Motherfucking Shit]

Yik Yak was all the rage for a few months because it was billed as an "anonymous" hyperlocal message board. As soon as the kids figured out that "anonymous" bomb/shooting threats over Yik Yak would still get them arrested, the user base went away. I don't understand how they managed to raise $73.5 million fucking dollars for this; apparently I need an introduction some of these venture capital people...

Re:So.... Yik Yakked?

[Darinbob]

Hyperlocal? Does that mean something other than being a buzzword?

Re:So.... Yik Yakked?

[LeftCoastThinker]

Actually from what I understand, they were doing pretty well until they decided to take away the anonymous aspect of their anonymous localized chat rooms. Apparently that was the draw, and when it disappeared, so did their user base.

What is Tik Tak?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

"Anonymous platform moving away from anonymity"

[Z80a]

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".

Re:"Anonymous platform moving away from anonymity"

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

A company I never heard of goes tits up

[Snotnose]

And I care because?......

meh

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

$73M for 50 people?

[tdailey]

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?

Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington?

[RightwingNutjob]

Are you serious? Yeah, those are totally legitimate names.

It's about scalability

[rsilvergun]

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)

Re: Well, at least someone made money

[TechyImmigrant]

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.