Square Said To Acquire Team From Struggling Social App Yik Yak (bloomberg.com)

According to Bloomberg, Square has acquired the engineering team of Yik Yak for "less than $3 million." From the report: The payments processor paid less than $3 million for between five and ten of Yik Yak's engineers, according to the person. Atlanta-based Yik Yak's Chief Executive Officer Tyler Droll will not join Square, the person added, asking not to be identified talking about a private matter. Atlanta-based Yik Yak, which started in 2013, created a smartphone app that allowed people to contribute to anonymous chat groups in a narrow geographical radius -- like college campuses.

Comments

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are some expensive slaves.

Re:Wow

[supremebob]

Yeah... I'm hoping that most of that money goes to the developers and not the CEO of Yik Yak. I doubt the dev team is going to stick around unless they got some huge signing bonuses.

That said, I'm kind of glad that Yik Yak going away. It was a prime example of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, and basically created modern day minority hate groups on college campuses:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-...

https://gimletmedia.com/episod...

Re:Wow

[ctilsie242]

Yik Yak had some merit, as there were some interesting conversations on there, but because it was "anonymous" at first, it just invited all the trolls.

What killed it for me was the fact that the app grabbed as much data as possible from your phone to "individualize" it... i.e. de-anonymize the user.

The problem with Anonymous Comments....

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with Anonymous comments is it can lead to all of the horrible things that college campuses were upset about. Harassment, hate speech ect.

4Chan is the perfect example of bad behavior of an Anonymous group of people.

More useless appz

[Anonymous Coward]

They can make apps that fail and go out of business as well

Attn Square

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop trying to not make Chrono Trigger 2.

captcha: leeches

Re:Attn Square

[Anonymous Coward]

Square Enix is up to C.T. 49 1/2 now, that's the only game they've ever made.

Square is a cheap mobile credit card processor using crappy hardware.

Yik Yak was useless garbage anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Yik Yak was always trash. In the vast majority of places there'd be no one saying anything, and anything you said would vanish and not show up in your local area for around half an hour. Hyper-local social stuff only works when enough people are in an area and using it to make it work. You'd think Yik Yak's developers had never been to a rural area of any sort; there might be a big distance between you and the next person with a smartphone and it's unlikely they'd have installed Yik Yak, yet Yik Yak thought it'd be a good idea to make the range only a few miles. No one said anything good on it anyway. It's shit just like Whisper.

Re:Yik Yak was useless garbage anyway

[speedplane]

Yik Yak was always trash.

Apparently three million dollar trash.

Re:Yik Yak was useless garbage anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, the "remote farmland" demographic would have saved them. The fools!

And BlahBlahBlah will not join either

[Anonymous Coward]

In related news, BlahBlahBlah.com, BarfGag.com, and UselessPhoneApp.com will not join. Yeah - snarky posting, but really? "Tyler Droll"? An impressive pseudonym at best. I would not mind getting $3M for achieving abt zero....
Show me the value added..

Flawed business model

[Anonymous Coward]

What stupid VC thought there would be a market for a yak-tracking app? We have very few yaks in USA, and in Tibet they have yaks to track but very little money for yak-tracking apps.

Failure

[speedplane]

$3M for a failed company? Doesn't seem fair.

Re: Failure

[Anonymous Coward]

I know, nowadays they usually go for billions. Maybe people are coming to their senses?