12 ms·

Thank You, Yakkers

157 points by coloneltcb 10y ago

sql12345 10y ago
As a college student, the old Yik Yak will be missed. I wish they would just change it back to what it originally was; it was very entertaining and useful that way. It's a testament to the dark side of VC's influence that this company was forced to kill their app in an ill-advised pivot just because the current model wasn't monetizing quickly enough.
- echelon 10y ago
  Are there new apps in the space Yik Yak used to occupy? I would have imagined that void would have been quickly filled by a newcomer.
  - Thlom 10y ago
    In parts of Europe Jodel[1] is pretty popular. [1] https://www.jodel-app.com https://www.jodel-app.com
  - lucasmullens 10y ago
    There's Whisper: http://whisper.sh/ http://whisper.sh/
    - ralfd 10y ago
      Judging from the website that looks like buzzword trash and the worst blog spam ("21 pet death which makes you love", "These 17 twins have dating problems ... here is why")
  - pmilla1606 10y ago
    I built this: https://dropanon.com https://dropanon.com. Not the same but similar
    - s73ver 10y ago
      How do you plan on curbing harassment? I think, after Twitter, it's just plain irresponsible to not have some kind of plan for that.
      - pmilla1606 10y ago
        Honestly, I never thought that far ahead. The whole thing started as an experiment: "can I get something on the AppStore". I had/have no plans beyond that.
        nthcolumn 10y ago
        Not an insurmountable issue. The community resolves the problem by tagging the offending items much like you stick a lollipop stick in dog turd at the park. Sometimes your kid still gets shit on her shoe but then you scan the items before they are dropped, keywords, whatevs. You could reduce the problem to vanishingly small.
      - pmilla1606 10y ago
        Honestly, I never thought that far ahead. The whole thing started as an experiment: "can I get something on the AppStore". I had/have no plans beyond that.
  - onewaystreet 10y ago
    It got filled by Facebook.
    - milquetoastaf 10y ago
      fb isn't anonymous
  - swiflie 10y ago
    We've thrown our hat into the ring: https://www.swiflie.com https://www.swiflie.com
  - rajat1saxena 10y ago
    Pollen Chat has been around for an Year. For Android only, as of now. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.raynstudios.pollenchat https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.raynstudios... I am the creator of the app.
  - joycey 10y ago
    As another user posted I would say the university Facebook meme pages have filled the void left by Yik Yak: inside jokes for people in your school. It's not anonymous, but the general use case and type of content is very similar.
  - pawelwentpawel 10y ago
    I have made Hoodchat live just today https://hoodchat.io https://hoodchat.io
  - deevolution 10y ago
    Not an app, but a browser extension that adds an anonymous posting board to your facebook news feed. Currently debating on weather to make it local (you only see posts from people in your immediate friend group) or to keep it global (anyone with the plugin can see all the posts). Check it out my early version at http://switchfeed.net http://switchfeed.net
- pitaa 10y ago
  I wouldn't at all blame the VC's for this. Yak killed their own app overnight by taking the main feature that made it popular - the fact that it was anonymous - and making an about-face to suddenly require usernames (and strongly encourage social media integration). The fact that they thought that was a good idea in the first place, along with the fact that they didn't think that maybe they should A B test the change in a smaller market first, clearly demonstrates to me that the founders didn't know what they were doing and didn't have what it would have taken to be successful. Before they shot themselves in the foot, they had a huge following among college students because the app was one of the best ways to get and share info on campus. You can't tell me that couldn't have been monetized. Hell, Durex could have made millions by offering $.50 off coupons on the app every night! It's not that it couldn't have made money, the founders just didn't seem to have a realistic vision for how they were going to do so.
  - nerfhammer 10y ago
    > require usernames (and strongly encourage social media integration) very possible that they thought it would be nearly impossible to monetize anonymous users > the fact that they didn't think that maybe they should A B test the change in a smaller market first, clearly demonstrates to me that the founders didn't know what they were doing Absolutely right. It's just like digg v4.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    > Yak killed their own app overnight by taking the main feature that made it popular - the fact that it was anonymous - and making an about-face to suddenly require usernames Wasn't anonymous harassment a rampant problem?
    - pitaa 10y ago
      Well, they blocked the app on all US middle- and high-school campuses so it couldn't be used for bullying. But past that I wouldn't call it a rampant problem. If anything the anonymous factor prevented harassment within the app, because between posts you couldn't identify anyone, thus no one could really carry grudges or become "popular." The main problems were the occasional bomb threat and the overall degenerate nature of some of the posts.
ChairmanPao 10y ago
Colleges banned it because their little snowflakes got offended.
angersock 10y ago
What an Incredible Journey!
- Signez 10y ago
  Of course, there is the mandatory tumblr: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ Even if it is sincere (most of the time, it is), there are words or expressions that "tags" an end-of-company-life corporate post very quickly.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    One thing I've concluded is that it can be sincere while at the same time not accounting for their employees blood pressure during the decline.
chambo622 10y ago
My favorite part of this post was how they tried to loosely tie Yik Yak to Square's mission. But they didn't beat around the bush that this was an acquihire. I used YikYak throughout its rise, peak, and as it started tapering off. It ended up being a comibation of meme/joke reposting from Reddit combined with a lot of really vulgar low-brow content. It was entertaining for a while but only due to the shock value.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
INCOG_THE_TROLL 10y ago
This is what happens when you kowtow to special interests who think they know what's best for 'civility'.
grizzles 10y ago
For investors, Yik Yak was a travesty. The fact that is raised nearly 9 figures along the way is yet another terrible indictment of the herd behavior found in private equity. One thing I find interesting about this turn of events is that the person shutting the app down is Jack Dorsey. If I was an ecommerce player like Shopify or Square, disrupting social would be at the top of my list of strategic things to do. But Jack Dorsey can't really do that, can he?
- balls187 10y ago
  > The fact that is raised nearly 9 figures along the way is yet another terrible indictment of the herd behavior found in private equity. How so? An app that targets college students, shows high user acquisition, DAU, has serious potential.
  - kbos87 10y ago
    Serious potential to do what? Even darling companies like snap can't figure out how to come anywhere near meeting expectations with the supposedly high value audiences they have.
    - creaghpatr 10y ago
      They had a critical mass of users and the geofenced posting concept had a lot of potential- had they reached maturity they had a lot of monetization potential, likely in the billions over the life of the company. In hindsight of course they should have anticipated the challenges of anonymity which are almost cliche at this point. But Facebook and twitter have yet to introduce a geofencing option for user posts as far as I know. Maybe they will eventually.
      - nxc18 10y ago
        Teens and college students hate advertising. Sometimes targeted advertising can work. How anonymous do you feel when apps pop up ads for that thing you were searching for two nights ago on Amazon? How many advertisers want to have their content featured next to the absolute worst thoughts people have? I regularly saw racist, sexist, homophobic, and inconsiderate content. Not to mention the sex, drugs, and underage drinking. A true advertiser's delight.
lapsock 10y ago
So... what's going on? are they shutting it down? if so, why don't they just say, "we're shutting it down". Why make me read 6 shitty paragraphs and in the end I don't know what the fuck I'm reading? good fucking riddance
- pitaa 10y ago
  HN thread from a few days ago with more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14186699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14186699
- praneshp 10y ago
  Why are you so angry? Did they make you force read the post?
  - azeirah 10y ago
    OP is angry because it's a common occurrence for companies in similar situation to hide behind fluffy language, while OP has the goal to understand what's going on.
    - praneshp 10y ago
      If that's the goal, he should know (from the comments on this post, from comments on other shutdown posts in the 100 days he has been here, etc) that this is the kind of language a shutdown post has. It's nothing new. This was one of the more sincere "our incredible journey" posts I've read since I started spending time on HN.
      - kakarot 10y ago
        Agreed, I enjoyed it. It wasn't needlessly long and they said what they wanted to say. And I even feel a little bad they're shutting down, because Yik Yak seems like a pretty sincere company from the looks of their blog.
        10y ago
marcelluspye 10y ago
For a good while, Yik Yak was very popular on my campus. Then when handles became mandatory, basically everyone stopped using it. Even after they back-pedaled, though, our feed was merged with several in the surrounding area, so we lost the sense of community we had with it on campus, and it never took off again. I don't know about overall, but in my social microcosm yik yak was never able to recover its lost users.
- rbobby 10y ago
  Never used the app, never heard of it... but I'm confused by "when handles became mandatory"? Prior to that it was just anonymous chat (with optional user id)? Why would requiring handles (user id's... right?) have made such a difference?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - nefitty 10y ago
    Imagine you suddenly applied HN's posting etiquette to 4Chan. That's basically how it felt.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    I never used it but my understanding is that it was an anonymous outlet where people in the area could post and get fed into the same channel. You could say whatever you wanted without worrying it getting traced back to you, and nearby people would see it. For obvious reasons, that was popular at colleges. Also for obvious reasons, this kind of thing is really hard to monetize. Take almost $100M in VC and this does not make for a winning combination. Online anonymity can be freeing, but as any half-awake internet user knows, it comes with a massive mound of worms for both readers and moderators alike. Big name investors apparently didn't realize this when they wrote the checks, so YikYak panicked and nixed its value proposition to keep investors happy and bad press diverted. It sounds like everyone stopped using it immediately, which seems only natural, as they killed its entire reason to exist.
Moter8 10y ago
In Germany/Europe there's basically a clone called Jodel and it's filled with shitty, reposted jokes and I'd say usage is declining too. They also do not have a monetization model, there aren't even any ads in the app.
- chki 10y ago
  I'm studying in Germany and Jodel is in my experience astonishingly popular among students. At a University with about 40.000 students there is an active community of 1000-4000 users and definitely more group communication than on Facebook or another place online. I'm curious how the will be monetizing as well but I do not see the decline you are speaking of.
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
I mean to me this is a totally wild story from the money side. - Raised $73 M from notable, no bullshit VC's including Sequoia, DCM, Draper - Valued around $400M (results may vary) - Sold for <$3M Either we don't know the whole story (>50% chance), someone fucked up royally with IP or something or everyone was pissed off about this entire situation. It's really surprising to me that the Series B folks couldn't engineer or claw back more than that, especially given the brand recognition etc... [1]https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/yik-yak#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/yik-yak#/entity [2]http://www.businessinsider.com/yik-yak-sells-to-square-for-3-million-bloomberg-2017-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/yik-yak-sells-to-square-for-3...
- sbierwagen 10y ago
  If we're talking about money wasted, the winner has to be Uber. Raised $8.8 billion, (billion!) lost $800 million (million!) 2016Q3, is on the fast track to bankruptcy, with nothing to show for it than a bunch of heavily subsidized cab rides.
  - nebabyte 10y ago
    Devil's advocate: "Growth" (Though of course I only set it up because it's so fun to knock down. Uber's 'growth' is of economically-minded bellweather users happy to jump ship to save a few bucks, and they have built next to zero and possibly even negative brand loyalty) If Uber can constantly outperform other apps on price (read: without huge ride subsidization) they might be able to maintain a tentuous lead; but even then it'd just be a war they'd be fighting on many fronts as a 'goliath' against hundreds of davids. And they (Uber) are fronting the major legal costs for all of them :)
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Valve, et al have taught us the major lesson: to have staying power, you must become a platform, and aggressively protect your source of lock-in. An ecosystem of applications/businesses that depend on your platform for access to a userbase is the best way to do this. The platform giants, especially Microsoft and Google and to a lesser extent Apple and Facebook, have the power to "NetScape" any other non-platform tech company at will. Mobile apps are coming to exist at Google's mercy, like web sites dependent on "organic" traffic have for the last decade. If Google decided they'd had enough of Uber, they could integrate ride hailing into GMaps and Uber would be done for. They just did this to a handful of startups that were oriented around real-time location tracking. [0] [0] https://blog.google/products/maps/share-your-trips-and-real-time-location-google-maps/ https://blog.google/products/maps/share-your-trips-and-real-...
whitehat2k9 10y ago
Looks like the good old-fashioned Facebook confessions pages will be around for quite a while longer...
itsyogesh 10y ago
Wouldn't it be nice if something like the old Yik Yak (anon one) be used for local news. Or is there anything already present in this anonymous local news space.
Aloha 10y ago
I'm all but certain this will be downvoted.. but.. I don't think you could have two more WASPy sounding names then "Tyler Droll & Brooks Buffington"
safeandsound 10y ago
Yik Yak is still very popular on my campus and it's one of the five apps that I use everyday. Very sad to see them go.
- bjgwolf 10y ago
  Which university is that? It died at ours already a few months ago :(
pg_bot 10y ago
YikYak baffled me for its entire existence, their product was incredibly simple from an engineering standpoint, they had no clear route to monetization and followed in the footsteps of several apps that shut down due to bad press. (Juicy Campus, College ACB) Yet they were able to raise an insane amount of capital from several respectable VCs. If there isn't a clear answer to how does this company make a million dollars they shouldn't be able to raise multiples of that amount.
- nthcolumn 10y ago
  Don't know anything about it really but it seems like greed killed this yikyak thing. Why did it have to be a unicorn when it could have just been a really nice pony? It could have made money selling anonymous polling data, sentiment, zeitgeist for marketing purposes. Everybody wants to know what the young folks are getting into next.
brudgers 10y ago
Recalling the history of YikYak and it's problem in dealing with anonymity reminded me of this video: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024060/Still-Logged-In-What-AR http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024060/Still-Logged-In-What-AR YikYak's struggle reflects a decade's worth internet troll evolution between Facebook and YikYak. At Harvard there was no iPhone, no precedents from Twitter, no standard arsenal trouble-making tools in the hands of college students.
peacheszero 10y ago
Swiflie seems like an up and coming alternative. They're kind of like yak meets twitter meets reddit.
- chrisbennet 10y ago
  peacheszero aka "swiflie" you're not fooling anyone. (Making multiple new HN accounts to advertise your app.)
The_Sp0iler 10y ago
It took over my campus. It replaced several twitter accounts that were specific to my school where people would DM the twitter account and then they'd post it. It used to be the first thing I checked when something happened on campus (accident, event going on, wifi goes out, etc). People went crazy for YikYak and then they added required handles and removed being able to post on/read your university's feed when you left campus. It took them way too long to change it back and people moved on.
Larrikin 10y ago
I wish they had just immediately shut it down. The feed is nothing but racism right now since presumably all the moderators have stopped caring.
aeriklawson 10y ago
I think the potential for this app was very high, but their awful, downright stupid product decisions played a large hand in their downfall (or at least expedited it) - removing anonymity (the main selling point of the app), constantly fucking around with "The Herd" feature, the list goes on. I remember seeing these things roll out and being so frustrated at whoever thought they were a good idea and the downfall of a solid app / community in the process.
dang 2y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20170430230219/https://blog.yikyak.com/blog/thank-you-yakkers https://web.archive.org/web/20170430230219/https://blog.yiky... https://archive.ph/uDMDY https://archive.ph/uDMDY

157 points by coloneltcb 10y ago

As a college student, the old Yik Yak will be missed. I wish they would just change it back to what it originally was; it was very entertaining and useful that way. It's a testament to the dark side of VC's influence that this company was forced to kill their app in an ill-advised pivot just because the current model wasn't monetizing quickly enough.

echelon 10y ago
Are there new apps in the space Yik Yak used to occupy? I would have imagined that void would have been quickly filled by a newcomer.
- Thlom 10y ago
  In parts of Europe Jodel[1] is pretty popular. [1] https://www.jodel-app.com https://www.jodel-app.com
- lucasmullens 10y ago
  There's Whisper: http://whisper.sh/ http://whisper.sh/
  - ralfd 10y ago
    Judging from the website that looks like buzzword trash and the worst blog spam ("21 pet death which makes you love", "These 17 twins have dating problems ... here is why")
- pmilla1606 10y ago
  I built this: https://dropanon.com https://dropanon.com. Not the same but similar
  - s73ver 10y ago
    How do you plan on curbing harassment? I think, after Twitter, it's just plain irresponsible to not have some kind of plan for that.
    - pmilla1606 10y ago
      Honestly, I never thought that far ahead. The whole thing started as an experiment: "can I get something on the AppStore". I had/have no plans beyond that.
      - nthcolumn 10y ago
        Not an insurmountable issue. The community resolves the problem by tagging the offending items much like you stick a lollipop stick in dog turd at the park. Sometimes your kid still gets shit on her shoe but then you scan the items before they are dropped, keywords, whatevs. You could reduce the problem to vanishingly small.
    - pmilla1606 10y ago
      Honestly, I never thought that far ahead. The whole thing started as an experiment: "can I get something on the AppStore". I had/have no plans beyond that.
- onewaystreet 10y ago
  It got filled by Facebook.
  - milquetoastaf 10y ago
    fb isn't anonymous
- swiflie 10y ago
  We've thrown our hat into the ring: https://www.swiflie.com https://www.swiflie.com
- rajat1saxena 10y ago
  Pollen Chat has been around for an Year. For Android only, as of now. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.raynstudios.pollenchat https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.raynstudios... I am the creator of the app.
- joycey 10y ago
  As another user posted I would say the university Facebook meme pages have filled the void left by Yik Yak: inside jokes for people in your school. It's not anonymous, but the general use case and type of content is very similar.
- pawelwentpawel 10y ago
  I have made Hoodchat live just today https://hoodchat.io https://hoodchat.io
- deevolution 10y ago
  Not an app, but a browser extension that adds an anonymous posting board to your facebook news feed. Currently debating on weather to make it local (you only see posts from people in your immediate friend group) or to keep it global (anyone with the plugin can see all the posts). Check it out my early version at http://switchfeed.net http://switchfeed.net
pitaa 10y ago
I wouldn't at all blame the VC's for this. Yak killed their own app overnight by taking the main feature that made it popular - the fact that it was anonymous - and making an about-face to suddenly require usernames (and strongly encourage social media integration). The fact that they thought that was a good idea in the first place, along with the fact that they didn't think that maybe they should A B test the change in a smaller market first, clearly demonstrates to me that the founders didn't know what they were doing and didn't have what it would have taken to be successful. Before they shot themselves in the foot, they had a huge following among college students because the app was one of the best ways to get and share info on campus. You can't tell me that couldn't have been monetized. Hell, Durex could have made millions by offering $.50 off coupons on the app every night! It's not that it couldn't have made money, the founders just didn't seem to have a realistic vision for how they were going to do so.
- nerfhammer 10y ago
  > require usernames (and strongly encourage social media integration) very possible that they thought it would be nearly impossible to monetize anonymous users > the fact that they didn't think that maybe they should A B test the change in a smaller market first, clearly demonstrates to me that the founders didn't know what they were doing Absolutely right. It's just like digg v4.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > Yak killed their own app overnight by taking the main feature that made it popular - the fact that it was anonymous - and making an about-face to suddenly require usernames Wasn't anonymous harassment a rampant problem?
  - pitaa 10y ago
    Well, they blocked the app on all US middle- and high-school campuses so it couldn't be used for bullying. But past that I wouldn't call it a rampant problem. If anything the anonymous factor prevented harassment within the app, because between posts you couldn't identify anyone, thus no one could really carry grudges or become "popular." The main problems were the occasional bomb threat and the overall degenerate nature of some of the posts.

ChairmanPao 10y ago

Colleges banned it because their little snowflakes got offended.

angersock 10y ago

What an Incredible Journey!

Signez 10y ago
Of course, there is the mandatory tumblr: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ Even if it is sincere (most of the time, it is), there are words or expressions that "tags" an end-of-company-life corporate post very quickly.
- rhizome 10y ago
  One thing I've concluded is that it can be sincere while at the same time not accounting for their employees blood pressure during the decline.

chambo622 10y ago

My favorite part of this post was how they tried to loosely tie Yik Yak to Square's mission. But they didn't beat around the bush that this was an acquihire. I used YikYak throughout its rise, peak, and as it started tapering off. It ended up being a comibation of meme/joke reposting from Reddit combined with a lot of really vulgar low-brow content. It was entertaining for a while but only due to the shock value.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

INCOG_THE_TROLL 10y ago

This is what happens when you kowtow to special interests who think they know what's best for 'civility'.

grizzles 10y ago

For investors, Yik Yak was a travesty. The fact that is raised nearly 9 figures along the way is yet another terrible indictment of the herd behavior found in private equity. One thing I find interesting about this turn of events is that the person shutting the app down is Jack Dorsey. If I was an ecommerce player like Shopify or Square, disrupting social would be at the top of my list of strategic things to do. But Jack Dorsey can't really do that, can he?

balls187 10y ago
> The fact that is raised nearly 9 figures along the way is yet another terrible indictment of the herd behavior found in private equity. How so? An app that targets college students, shows high user acquisition, DAU, has serious potential.
- kbos87 10y ago
  Serious potential to do what? Even darling companies like snap can't figure out how to come anywhere near meeting expectations with the supposedly high value audiences they have.
  - creaghpatr 10y ago
    They had a critical mass of users and the geofenced posting concept had a lot of potential- had they reached maturity they had a lot of monetization potential, likely in the billions over the life of the company. In hindsight of course they should have anticipated the challenges of anonymity which are almost cliche at this point. But Facebook and twitter have yet to introduce a geofencing option for user posts as far as I know. Maybe they will eventually.
    - nxc18 10y ago
      Teens and college students hate advertising. Sometimes targeted advertising can work. How anonymous do you feel when apps pop up ads for that thing you were searching for two nights ago on Amazon? How many advertisers want to have their content featured next to the absolute worst thoughts people have? I regularly saw racist, sexist, homophobic, and inconsiderate content. Not to mention the sex, drugs, and underage drinking. A true advertiser's delight.

lapsock 10y ago

So... what's going on? are they shutting it down? if so, why don't they just say, "we're shutting it down". Why make me read 6 shitty paragraphs and in the end I don't know what the fuck I'm reading? good fucking riddance

pitaa 10y ago
HN thread from a few days ago with more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14186699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14186699
praneshp 10y ago
Why are you so angry? Did they make you force read the post?
- azeirah 10y ago
  OP is angry because it's a common occurrence for companies in similar situation to hide behind fluffy language, while OP has the goal to understand what's going on.
  - praneshp 10y ago
    If that's the goal, he should know (from the comments on this post, from comments on other shutdown posts in the 100 days he has been here, etc) that this is the kind of language a shutdown post has. It's nothing new. This was one of the more sincere "our incredible journey" posts I've read since I started spending time on HN.
    - kakarot 10y ago
      Agreed, I enjoyed it. It wasn't needlessly long and they said what they wanted to say. And I even feel a little bad they're shutting down, because Yik Yak seems like a pretty sincere company from the looks of their blog.
      - 10y ago

marcelluspye 10y ago

For a good while, Yik Yak was very popular on my campus. Then when handles became mandatory, basically everyone stopped using it. Even after they back-pedaled, though, our feed was merged with several in the surrounding area, so we lost the sense of community we had with it on campus, and it never took off again. I don't know about overall, but in my social microcosm yik yak was never able to recover its lost users.

rbobby 10y ago
Never used the app, never heard of it... but I'm confused by "when handles became mandatory"? Prior to that it was just anonymous chat (with optional user id)? Why would requiring handles (user id's... right?) have made such a difference?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- nefitty 10y ago
  Imagine you suddenly applied HN's posting etiquette to 4Chan. That's basically how it felt.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  I never used it but my understanding is that it was an anonymous outlet where people in the area could post and get fed into the same channel. You could say whatever you wanted without worrying it getting traced back to you, and nearby people would see it. For obvious reasons, that was popular at colleges. Also for obvious reasons, this kind of thing is really hard to monetize. Take almost $100M in VC and this does not make for a winning combination. Online anonymity can be freeing, but as any half-awake internet user knows, it comes with a massive mound of worms for both readers and moderators alike. Big name investors apparently didn't realize this when they wrote the checks, so YikYak panicked and nixed its value proposition to keep investors happy and bad press diverted. It sounds like everyone stopped using it immediately, which seems only natural, as they killed its entire reason to exist.

Moter8 10y ago

In Germany/Europe there's basically a clone called Jodel and it's filled with shitty, reposted jokes and I'd say usage is declining too. They also do not have a monetization model, there aren't even any ads in the app.

chki 10y ago
I'm studying in Germany and Jodel is in my experience astonishingly popular among students. At a University with about 40.000 students there is an active community of 1000-4000 users and definitely more group communication than on Facebook or another place online. I'm curious how the will be monetizing as well but I do not see the decline you are speaking of.

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

I mean to me this is a totally wild story from the money side. - Raised $73 M from notable, no bullshit VC's including Sequoia, DCM, Draper - Valued around $400M (results may vary) - Sold for <$3M Either we don't know the whole story (>50% chance), someone fucked up royally with IP or something or everyone was pissed off about this entire situation. It's really surprising to me that the Series B folks couldn't engineer or claw back more than that, especially given the brand recognition etc... [1]https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/yik-yak#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/yik-yak#/entity [2]http://www.businessinsider.com/yik-yak-sells-to-square-for-3-million-bloomberg-2017-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/yik-yak-sells-to-square-for-3...

sbierwagen 10y ago
If we're talking about money wasted, the winner has to be Uber. Raised $8.8 billion, (billion!) lost $800 million (million!) 2016Q3, is on the fast track to bankruptcy, with nothing to show for it than a bunch of heavily subsidized cab rides.
- nebabyte 10y ago
  Devil's advocate: "Growth" (Though of course I only set it up because it's so fun to knock down. Uber's 'growth' is of economically-minded bellweather users happy to jump ship to save a few bucks, and they have built next to zero and possibly even negative brand loyalty) If Uber can constantly outperform other apps on price (read: without huge ride subsidization) they might be able to maintain a tentuous lead; but even then it'd just be a war they'd be fighting on many fronts as a 'goliath' against hundreds of davids. And they (Uber) are fronting the major legal costs for all of them :)
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Valve, et al have taught us the major lesson: to have staying power, you must become a platform, and aggressively protect your source of lock-in. An ecosystem of applications/businesses that depend on your platform for access to a userbase is the best way to do this. The platform giants, especially Microsoft and Google and to a lesser extent Apple and Facebook, have the power to "NetScape" any other non-platform tech company at will. Mobile apps are coming to exist at Google's mercy, like web sites dependent on "organic" traffic have for the last decade. If Google decided they'd had enough of Uber, they could integrate ride hailing into GMaps and Uber would be done for. They just did this to a handful of startups that were oriented around real-time location tracking. [0] [0] https://blog.google/products/maps/share-your-trips-and-real-time-location-google-maps/ https://blog.google/products/maps/share-your-trips-and-real-...

whitehat2k9 10y ago

Looks like the good old-fashioned Facebook confessions pages will be around for quite a while longer...

itsyogesh 10y ago

Wouldn't it be nice if something like the old Yik Yak (anon one) be used for local news. Or is there anything already present in this anonymous local news space.

Aloha 10y ago

I'm all but certain this will be downvoted.. but.. I don't think you could have two more WASPy sounding names then "Tyler Droll & Brooks Buffington"

safeandsound 10y ago

Yik Yak is still very popular on my campus and it's one of the five apps that I use everyday. Very sad to see them go.

bjgwolf 10y ago
Which university is that? It died at ours already a few months ago :(

pg_bot 10y ago

YikYak baffled me for its entire existence, their product was incredibly simple from an engineering standpoint, they had no clear route to monetization and followed in the footsteps of several apps that shut down due to bad press. (Juicy Campus, College ACB) Yet they were able to raise an insane amount of capital from several respectable VCs. If there isn't a clear answer to how does this company make a million dollars they shouldn't be able to raise multiples of that amount.

nthcolumn 10y ago
Don't know anything about it really but it seems like greed killed this yikyak thing. Why did it have to be a unicorn when it could have just been a really nice pony? It could have made money selling anonymous polling data, sentiment, zeitgeist for marketing purposes. Everybody wants to know what the young folks are getting into next.

brudgers 10y ago

Recalling the history of YikYak and it's problem in dealing with anonymity reminded me of this video: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024060/Still-Logged-In-What-AR http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024060/Still-Logged-In-What-AR YikYak's struggle reflects a decade's worth internet troll evolution between Facebook and YikYak. At Harvard there was no iPhone, no precedents from Twitter, no standard arsenal trouble-making tools in the hands of college students.

peacheszero 10y ago

Swiflie seems like an up and coming alternative. They're kind of like yak meets twitter meets reddit.

chrisbennet 10y ago
peacheszero aka "swiflie" you're not fooling anyone. (Making multiple new HN accounts to advertise your app.)

The_Sp0iler 10y ago

It took over my campus. It replaced several twitter accounts that were specific to my school where people would DM the twitter account and then they'd post it. It used to be the first thing I checked when something happened on campus (accident, event going on, wifi goes out, etc). People went crazy for YikYak and then they added required handles and removed being able to post on/read your university's feed when you left campus. It took them way too long to change it back and people moved on.

Larrikin 10y ago

I wish they had just immediately shut it down. The feed is nothing but racism right now since presumably all the moderators have stopped caring.

aeriklawson 10y ago

I think the potential for this app was very high, but their awful, downright stupid product decisions played a large hand in their downfall (or at least expedited it) - removing anonymity (the main selling point of the app), constantly fucking around with "The Herd" feature, the list goes on. I remember seeing these things roll out and being so frustrated at whoever thought they were a good idea and the downfall of a solid app / community in the process.

dang 2y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20170430230219/https://blog.yikyak.com/blog/thank-you-yakkers https://web.archive.org/web/20170430230219/https://blog.yiky... https://archive.ph/uDMDY https://archive.ph/uDMDY