18 ms·

Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

259 points by Vaslo 7y ago

pcunite 7y ago
... the FBI had taken control of a Kik user's account to run groups sharing such illegal imagery for over a year ... Think about that for moment.
- mattigames 7y ago
  Everything old is new again, the crack epidemic was fueled by the CIA[0] and they killed one of the whisteblowers (Gary Webb) and the FBI has recently been involved with the Jeffrey Epstein cover up[1]. Those institutions have little to none accountability which makes them extremely attractive to the wealthy to put them in their pockets; and even when those institutions have the best intentions such lack of checks and accountability sometimes makes them equal or worst than the criminals they aim for. [0] https://www.globalresearch.ca/crack-and-the-contras-how-the-cia-mainstream-media-propaganda-and-the-contras-fueled-the-crack-cocaine-epidemic/5629132 https://www.globalresearch.ca/crack-and-the-contras-how-the-... [1]https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fbi-is-involved-in-jeffrey-epstein-cover-up-x6b3fxgm9 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fbi-is-involved-in-jeffre...
  - jachee 7y ago
    Lawful Evil, so to speak.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      That alignment is over-represented in the federal government.
- mirimir 7y ago
  That's a standard tactic. I mean, the FBI ran Playpen, a Tor onion site for sharing CP, for almost two weeks, while dropping phone-home malware on users' devices. Edit: I forgot to include a link.[0] And this was just one operation. I suspect that there are teams at the FBI that specialize in CP operations. 0) https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qkj8vv/the-fbis-unprecedented-hacking-campaign-targeted-over-a-thousand-computers https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qkj8vv/the-fbis-unprecede...
  - seph-reed 7y ago
    I'm not sure if this is what OP meant, but a year is long time. It was literally some teams job to share CP on kik for a whole year. That's a long damn job.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      Everyone at FBI is there voluntarily.
      - rolltiide 7y ago
        living out their dream of sharing CP “Yes, it was I! My machinations lay undetected for years for I am a master of deception”
    - mirimir 7y ago
      Also, for normal people, hardcore amateur CP doesn't really come across as sex. It's mainly about punishment, humiliation and touture. So in that sense, I suspect that it's easier to live with.
- not_a_cop75 7y ago
  Many US agencies have full access to "private" messaging services. Don't be fooled into thinking anything is really private.
edude03 7y ago
Not to diminish the importance of the child abuse but the real problem seems to be "securities fraud" not child abuse, so I'm not sure why the title and the article bring up the child abuse as if it's the reason for the closure?
- dooglius 7y ago
  There's been child abuse on Facebook too, but it doesn't seem to get the moniker "app plagued by child abuse".
  - bepvte 7y ago
    2 months ago, when I last browsed kik, I saw many publicly accessible groups in the browser with titles like "15+ sexy rp"
  - Kostchei 7y ago
    Unfortunately from a ex-LEO perspective, it has been very popular with children and heavily hunted by sex offenders, at least in the communities I served in. Doing digital forensics, almost every police officer in a child protection case would be asking "can we get the kik history off that phone?" Not be cause they were guessing but based on experience or admissions by the victim. Part of the seedy underbelly that 75% of the community don't get exposed to. People found it hard to believe when these sort of network-related offences occurred in churches too. Some religious groups are/were more prone to it than others, often based on opportunity or expectations.
- dang 7y ago
  Ok, we've replaced the article title with a phrase from the first sentence.
jonathankoren 7y ago
The weird thing about Kik was that everyone I met that used it thought it had some sort automatic message deletion like Telegram, but I don't think it did. Old messages would stay forever.
- wang_li 7y ago
  That’s not the case. After a certain number of messages in a chat, old ones disappear.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  Messages were stored to the device. If you installed and logged into Kik on another device, the chat history would clear.
quickthrower2 7y ago
... but will it take out a bunch of NPM packages with it?
- choward 7y ago
  At least they brought attention to how bad it was to rely on NPM. If anyone doesn't remember, this is how the whole left-pad issue started: https://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-npm https://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-np...
  - asveikau 7y ago
    Off-topic, but pretty crazy that the timestamp of that blog post doesn't appear until the end, so you can be reading an article from 2016 and not immediately know that this was a few years ago.
    - laughinghan 7y ago
      All of tumblr works like that. Not defending, just contextualizing, and clarifying that NPM didn't make that specific design choice. Obviously, they chose to use tumblr, though.
      - vxNsr 7y ago
        Well at the time tumblr was the blog platform of choice, now I'm sure they'd use medium
  - gyrgtyn 7y ago
    No one seemed to remember during the Chef thing!
  - soneca 7y ago
    > "Given two packages vying for the name kik, we believe that a substantial number of users who type npm install kik would be confused to receive code unrelated to the messaging app with over 200 million users." So apparently the former Kik package would have outlived the company Kik despite its number of users.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
> "While we are ready to take on the SEC in court, we underestimated the tactics they would employ. How they would take our quotes out of context to manipulate the public to view us as bad actors. How they would pressure exchanges not to list Kin. And how they would draw out a long and expensive process to drain our resources." Anything you say, can and WILL be used against you in a court of law. Without good lawyers you are screwed. Careful what you say publicly and to officers or anybody like the SEC. Bring a lawyer, discuss your battle plan. If a cop says only guilty people need lawyers you pay no attention to such ignorance. Lawyer the hell up.
- thinkingkong 7y ago
  Whats makes you think they didnt have lawyers the entire time?
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Good lawyers would likely not have provided advice suggesting this course of action.
    - echelon 7y ago
      > this course of action Which course of action? Closing? Doing an ICO?
      - wavefunction 7y ago
        Air-dropping financial instruments to minors.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- ed_elliott_asc 7y ago
  An old adage, “only guilty people talk”. Shut up , don’t say anything and you’ll probably walk.
criddell 7y ago
What was the $1B valuation based on? It seems absurd.
- fouc 7y ago
  Whatsapp. Slack. Any chat app with sufficient user base seems to end up with multi-billion valuation.
  - djsumdog 7y ago
    This almost fees like the valuation was based upon the probability Facebook might buy them?
- thesausageking 7y ago
  The $1B valuation was for their last round which was a $50m investment by Tencent, the company behind WeChat. The investment was more about a partnership between the companies than the economics. At the time, Kik's CEO said: "Today, there are only five other companies in the world that see the future like we do: Tencent, Line, Facebook, Snapchat, and Telegram. One of them owns the largest internet market in the world. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with them as we run this race."
  - criddell 7y ago
    I even wonder how Tencent thought Kik was worth $50m. That seems absurd.
    - thesausageking 7y ago
      When Tencent invested, it had 300m users including 40% of teenagers in the US, and were growing fast. For Tencent (which makes WeChat), it's worth it to spend 0.03% of their market cap to partner with a fast growing app in the US market.
- tgv 7y ago
  I've discovered a foolproof way to make billions of dollars and take controlling interest in the major corporation of your choice. I'll share my secret with you, since I'm all done using my system (hint: if you want to buy any corporation known by three capital letters... forget it.). Step 1: Find somebody you trust to work with you as your partner. Your wife is a good choice, although in a pinch your pet hamster will suffice. Step 2: Create a dot.com company. Building a company with strong technical underpinnings and lead by a passionate and visionary leader is best. However, you can also cycle through e-<word>.com, choosing <word>'s from the dictionary until you find one which isn't used. Whatever. If you find all the names are used, try the dictionary of a foreign language. Step 3: Go public! Issue 1,000,000,000 shares of stock. Keep 999,999,999 shares for yourself, and sell the other share. Step 4: Have your partner buy that share for $100. Step 5: Party!!!!! You now have a $100 billion market cap. Make sure you give interviews to Time, WSJ, and so forth. (If you don't understand why you have a $100 billion market cap, please close your AOL account and go back to your day job; this system isn't for you.) Step 6: Buy the company of your choice, using your $100 billion in stock. (Note: avoid companies created using this system.) Step 7: Retire. You've worked hard, and you deserve it. (edit: source unknown, found on r.h.f a long time ago)
SolarNet 7y ago
Most apps have child abuse problems. Of all the examples of how modern corporations externalize risk and internalize profits, I think the child abuse for ad revenue on content is particularly egregious (one example link here is that the children are the viewers and consumers of the ads (advertising to children being worth more money in many contexts), and the child abusers post massive amounts of content that children will consume (and hence watch the ads on), which the abusers then leverage into contact (and from there abuse); there are plenty of examples). Google researched this, it would take 30,000 employees to manage their communities against child abuse effectively (not watch all content; a mistake people always seem to make when I say this). This would be about a fourth of youtube's suspected profits, so of course that isn't happening. Instead relying on machine learning and other clever solutions which are either ineffective or make the problem worse (youtube heroes for example). Tumblr had similar problems and got temporarily banned from app stores over it. They of course banned all NSFW content, which didn't actually fix the problem (notably the beacon posts, and their crappy design (click share on child pornography to report it), and the ease of access to children; problems that Kik shares as it happens). And lets not even get started on the easily accessible chat rooms and online games targeted at children (quick, how hard is it to make a chat app, download some shitty cartoon graphics, and access a webcam? what like a day of effort? yeaaa... search "kid" and "chat" see what comes up, go on, I'll wait). I would say that this would be a way to disrupt the chat market, but I don't even think anyone cares (worse than that, it will probably come off as idiotic, "kids are early adopters" anyone?). People will care when it comes to invading privacy: "think of the children" will be used to introduce stricter controls like it always has. But children are being harmed by companies that actively invade our privacy already (and hence cooperate with the powers that be), they get a free pass because it was never really about the children. Of course the irony is that this app wasn't shut down because of child abuse problems, but because of financial/regulation problems and a pivot. Running a cryptocurrency actually probably does have less criminal risk (and for that matter moral hazard) than running a chat platform (which is an insane statement, but that's where we are). The only sorta-workable solution I have (that isn't stricter regulation of tech companies and chat platforms) for this issue is federation. Creating local chat platforms backed by local moderators (who have a stake in a positive platform) tied to real people (removing anonymity at the local level, but keeping pseudo-anonymity on the broader internet, but then you also know your system admin), this should overall encourage better behavior. But also children can be restricted to the local community (where it is safe, and they also can't make a nuisance of themselves), the federation would bring them content they could comment on and discuss with their friends (e.g. they could watch and comment on their favorite youtuber's videos, but conversations would be kept local). And of course a parent could white list remote friends, and communities can have "penpal" or "sister" communities that they whitelist in their entirety because they have close ties. Mastodon and other open federated social media platforms are working towards things like this. This of course comes back to the parental control issue (most notably that parents suck at using them). But the point I would make is that such systems would be community backed, and offer better parental controls. Mixing in things like community ran game servers, document clouds, and so on would also do wonders.
smallgovt 7y ago
Sorry but it’s hard for me to believe an app with so many users is just going to close down for a reason that’s largely tangential to the strength of its core business. It’s much more likely this is a ploy to get the SEC or other litigating parties to settle for a smaller amount.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  But do those users actually make the app any money? If not, there may not be a lot of real value there? Or at least, not enough to interest the kind of buyers capable of taking on the technical and social maintenance required.
- davidgerard 7y ago
  The messaging service has been haemorrhaging money its entire existence. Kik has never made money. The crypto scheme was a Hail Mary pass. Now it's the only hope they have.
Deimorz 7y ago
This is just Forbes blogspam of the original blog post: https://medium.com/@tedlivingston/moving-forward-boldly-with-kin-ec6290a6453 https://medium.com/@tedlivingston/moving-forward-boldly-with... It was submitted to HN here, and I noted that it would be unlikely to get attention because of its title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21055034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21055034 HN's strict title rules encourage submitting blogspam that writes sensationalized titles like this (and it's even been dialed back now).
- SolarNet 7y ago
  Except it adds context about the child abuse on Kik and some of the issues facing it. It's half blogspam, but it isn't entirely.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- jessaustin 7y ago
  Maybe my reading comprehension could improve, but somehow I didn't have the loud "SCAM!" alarm going off in my head the whole time I read the blog... unlike TFA. [EDIT]: Also, "Moving Forward Boldly"? That seems like it would be #2, right below "Our Incredible Journey" on the list of this-must-be-irony titles for startup failure posts.
  - sova 7y ago
    Yeah, they're actually going to reduce burn by 85%, have an elite 19 person team, and fight the SEC in court. Seems pretty bold actually.
    - bdcravens 7y ago
      While terminating the app that gave them all of their tech credibility.
Animats 7y ago
Another unregistered security disguised as an ICO. What did they expect? There was this mindset in the "crypto" community that they'd found a way to make "take the money and run" legal. They were wrong. SEC info on ICOs: [1] The SEC has been shutting down about one ICO operation a week, starting with the really sleazy ones.[1] It's possible to have a legit token that's not a security, but it has to mostly be used for something like buying music or games, and not primarily cashed out as a speculative investment. You can ask the SEC for a "no action letter" for a legit token. The latest thing is virtual reality world ICO tokens. See "Decentraland" and "Sominium Space". They're both frantically trying to put enough reality behind their virtual worlds that they can argue that their "blockchain based virtual land sales" are to people who want to use the VR world, not to people who want to flip virtual land. Howeycoins: https://www.howeycoins.com https://www.howeycoins.com [1] https://www.sec.gov/ICO https://www.sec.gov/ICO [2] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-actions https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...
bradhe 7y ago
If anyone reading this works on Forbes’ web team: Your page hijacking ads and modals begging me to “sign up” are just destroying the reading experience. Please, fix your shit before you ask people for money!
- primitivesuave 7y ago
  I am a bit concerned by how I didn't even notice reading the article through only four exposed lines on the page while blocking out 80% of the space that had been taken over by ads popping in from all sides. It's become so commonplace that I've developed some kind of subconscious process to deal with it.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Oh it's horrendous. Slide up notification appears from the bottom, then 1 second later blue IBM ad covers screen (no X button as far as I can tell). Then another popup appears above the IBM ad with an ad. I close the bottom and popup and the IBM goes by itself, and a video to the left starts autoplaying (thankfully muted!). I scroll down and some animated ads dynamically appear on the right, followed by the big blue IBM ad covering the screen again. To the URL bar I march... https://outline.com/djgeH2 https://outline.com/djgeH2
- jessaustin 7y ago
  Are you really browsing without uBlock Origin? Yikes. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
swiley 7y ago
Ok so I've used kik for years (I have a pen pall in Germany, we both went through the transition to and from university together.) Their app was delay tolerant and had decent read receipts which was amazing when I lived in the country side with my parents and had a worthless internet connection. That being said... kik never built a desktop application, if you didn't have your phone you couldn't even know if you had a message waiting. Even if you went through the trouble to run an android emulator it deleted all your messages each time you switched devices. Kik got pretty caught up in the whole bot thing, and kept cutting the legs out from the third party developers that was stupid. They were so weird about groups, and the 50 person limit per group made them pretty useless when combined with the reputation the app had. discourd really kind of ate their lunch (and personally I really don't like discourd but at least I can connect to it with pidgen and join the popular groups.) EDIT: oh its for securities fraud with their stupid crypto currency that literally no one used? That's dumb.
- unicornfinder 7y ago
  The lack of a desktop app really hurt it in my eyes, but to be honest I think it was really just killed by the fact that WhatsApp, Telegram etc are downright better (and most people are pretty happy just using Facebook anyway).
lemagedurage 7y ago
One and a half year ago, I built an (unofficial) bot, Ragebot [0], that would function as spam protection for the many bot accounts joining public Kik groups. The project took off and was added to hundreds of thousands of groups by Kik users. Two days ago, Ted Livingston announced the closure and Kik has been chaos throughout ever since, with people adopting Discord and Telegram to retain their online friend circles. One way in which Kik stood out from other popular chat clients was the ability to search for public groups. Even though this feature came with some amount of darkness, people could easily find peers with common interests and make friends. It's a real shame that this platform has to go. At the moment not much information is available beyond Ted's original blog post, I hope more clarification will follow soon. [0] https://ragebot.net https://ragebot.net
- landonxjames 7y ago
  >Even though this feature came with some amount of darkness I could guess at what you mean, but don't want to be wrong. Could you elaborate on what kind of darkness you were referring to?
  - jachee 7y ago
    Groups of—shall we say—fringe interests of dubious (or outright extra-) legality.
- scoot 7y ago
  I'm confused. Not a Kik user, but how are public groups a unique feature (compared to say Subreddits)?
  - injaki 7y ago
    OP meant searchable public group. In discord you need an invite link, and there's no way to search by its name.
    - lytedev 7y ago
      But I believe you can search for subreddits as well? The same is true on BAND with searchable, public, joinable communities.
dvt 7y ago
I don't really understand how they screwed this one up. I don't really think their closure has much to do with the child abuse stuff (Snapchat had their fair share of controversies), but rather their focusing on their nonsense ICO -- not sure if this was idealism, stupidity, or greed. Kik filled a fantastic niche shared by both WhatsApp and Snapchat (and to a lesser extent Instagram), how did they drop the ball?
- grawprog 7y ago
  >Kik filled a fantastic niche shared by both WhatsApp and Snapchat (and to a lesser extent Instagram), how did they drop the ball? Kik actually provided something WhatsApp (I'm not sure about Snapchat) didn't: the ability to chat fairly anonymously without needing to provide a phone number. It sure was full of bots though.
chx 7y ago
Cryptocurrencies are scam. End. This is very simple. Yes, they are a new kind of scam, a good name suggested is Nakamoto Scheme. https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/ https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/ Also notable: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-but-bitcoin-is-like-the-early-internet/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu... which doesn't outright call it a scam but certainly points out > Git gives you pretty much everything offered by the business case for blockchains. The one thing it doesn’t do is add a ridiculously wasteful proof-of-work mechanism for who’s allowed to add transactions to the <del>blockchain</del> repository. Multiple examples of actually useful software branded “blockchain” turn out to be simplified versions of Git. > Git was released in 2005, four years before Bitcoin — none of the good ideas in blockchains are new, and none of the new ideas have turned out to be much good.
- dpc_pw 7y ago
  What a nonsense you have there. :D
  - JoachimSchipper 7y ago
    This is not a high-quality response; please be polite, and point out any actual errors you see.
- coralreef 7y ago
  Right. I'm going to challenge you to: - prevent or reverse any of my transactions - confiscate my bitcoin, or even find out how much I have You can't, and never will. Some cryptocurrencies are scams. But if you're saying all cryptocurrencies are scams, you're simply saying math and economics are a scam.
  - quaquaqua1 7y ago
    Agreed. Certain banks are scams. Certain coins are scams. The technical layer is entirely separated from the business layer.
  - 7y ago
colechristensen 7y ago
Wow. People are ridiculous about cryptocurrencies and the SEC's authority to regulate securities (and decide what a security is). To have an enormously engaged platform with a moderation problem and a cryptocurrency with an SEC problem and to pick the SEC problem is ... I'm sorry for the workers, their families, and their investors that they're losing their jobs and the work they put into the platform will just be gone because the founders have dreams about money laundering and securities fraud (and delusions about labeling what they are doing as something else).
- bytematic 7y ago
  Great point since it was a well functioning large messaging platform. That's not easy, a ton of work went into marketing, engineering, and strategy to get to this point. All that thrown away, yikes.
- lallysingh 7y ago
  It's text chat. They're sending strings between web browsers with a server in the middle. Google releases 5-10 new chat services a year. They don't have much to keep them afloat outside of moatless-popularity. Their position was always incredibly fragile. A few small bumps is all that's needed by to take them out. They didn't recognize that and fell over.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  I bet the core business was in trouble, so they downsized, threw a Hail Mary, and are pitching it as a pivot. Odd that they didn't try to sell the core product, though.
  - colechristensen 7y ago
    It seems like their plan for monetizing it had been going on a long time and failed to get them off the runway before it ended so now they're doubling down on the monetization but dropping the platform it was supposed to monetize.
  - davidgerard 7y ago
arthurcolle 7y ago
Next up Telegram! TON whitepaper was full of so much nonsense that its hard to even comprehend any alternative basis in reason outside of "moneygrab!"
- davidgerard 7y ago
  I admired the way that for the TON offering, Telegram very specifically gouged only a few very rich investors who totally had all the knowledge and information they needed to know better, and nobody else. I understand (from industry gossip) that most of the Telegram TON VCs have already written it off.
sequoia 7y ago
Does this mean we can add leftpad back to npm?
nikolay 7y ago
Kik, Telegram, and Skype has a spam issue. Until they solve it, they are doomed. I have "nikolay" on Telegram and get tends of messages from scammers daily. Same with Skype, and Kik. I don't get spam on Viber and Messenger and that's why I use those. All the rest are not worth my time although I love both Telegram and Skype more than the rest, but don't have the nerves to deal with their basic design issues.
- reilly3000 7y ago
  It seems more appropriate to me to start punishing spammers rather than holding platforms accountable for their customer’s behavior.
  - untog 7y ago
    Who is going to punish the scammers if not the platforms?
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    Good luck trying to punish someone in Macedonia, Nigeria or whatever other place that has Internet but no legal support agreement with a Western state.
  - nikolay 7y ago
    Guess what happened - I kept blocking every offender and suddenly Microsoft locked me out of my account for more than 2 weeks. My Outlook, my Xbox, my Office, and many other paid services - gone! Why? Because, according to them, I had hundreds of blocked people! Well, there's no way to report for spam or scam - you can either delete a chat (they can message you again) or block them. At least these are the options on desktop. Skype has my contacts synced - why I don't have an option to block any contact from a person who's not in my contacts?! Or at least put them in second queue like Facebook Messenger does? Or allow messages only from people with verified phone? Of course, Skype is guilty as they don't bother to solve this problem.
kizer 7y ago
Too many people sharing nudes (their own and not their own) and other pornography; for those normal people who stay 50+ miles away from the "chans". Also, I agree with other that spam is cancerous in these messaging apps. Think about how much spam your email client filters; "publicly addressable" apps need the same logic.
jo-wol 7y ago
npm must return the kik project to Azer now! https://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-npm https://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-np...
- rk06 7y ago
  I came here for this. In fact, that fiasco is the only reason I recognize Kik the company.
chataway 7y ago
side note with the downfall of Kik, If anyone has experience with building group chat apps that scale, or is solid with react native, I am building a group chat app that eliminates the need to have invite codes or an admin to regulate who comes in to the group chat. People with association are in, randos cant even see the group exists. Basic MVP with messing is already done, made with react native. Just need help with adding images, some login stuff, make it look a tad slicker, and most of all, the on going backend tweaking. yes the world need yet another messaging app. email is in the profile.
- cj 7y ago
  Why create a throwaway account to solicit contributors to your chat app? Comes across as sketchy.
  - chataway 7y ago
    I am a regular HN reader. I just would prefer to not make it public just yet, hence the throwaway. I am based in the Bay Area, happy to meetup with whoever thinks they might be interested in joining the project and has skills. (or skype if someone is outside the bay) edit: I see two posts calling post/idea sketchy, I will maybe choose my wording better next time, and I promise it isn't.
- SQueeeeeL 7y ago
  Soooooo people are just supposed to give you very expensive highly specific consulting... And you don't seem to value your product much or have a specific technical idea how to proceed. 10/10 Hackernews today
- johntiger1 7y ago
  > I am building a group chat app that eliminates the need to have invite codes or an admin to regulate who comes in to the group chat. People with association are in, randos cant even see the group exists. Curious as to how you'll make the last point work. Seems a little sketchy to me
- k_vi 7y ago
somebodythere 7y ago
So Kin, according to Kik, is not a security, but a utility token. Now that Kik is dead, what's "utility" about it? They should have stuck to calling it a security.
penispooper 7y ago
i've been waiting for the bubble to burst for some time
StanislavPetrov 7y ago
Another unicorn goes extinct.
throwaway4729 7y ago
Kik is super common among certain online kink communities, it’ll be interesting to see where they move to. And given the underage problem those communities constantly have I wouldn’t find it at all hard to imagine Kik having some pretty grim stuff going on particularly in their new-ish group chats.
jugg1es 7y ago
Forbes is totally unreadable. Even when you ignore the side-bar ads, you then get a new one 30 seconds into the visit that slides in over-top the text you are reading. What has the internet become.

259 points by Vaslo 7y ago

... the FBI had taken control of a Kik user's account to run groups sharing such illegal imagery for over a year ... Think about that for moment.

mattigames 7y ago
Everything old is new again, the crack epidemic was fueled by the CIA[0] and they killed one of the whisteblowers (Gary Webb) and the FBI has recently been involved with the Jeffrey Epstein cover up[1]. Those institutions have little to none accountability which makes them extremely attractive to the wealthy to put them in their pockets; and even when those institutions have the best intentions such lack of checks and accountability sometimes makes them equal or worst than the criminals they aim for. [0] https://www.globalresearch.ca/crack-and-the-contras-how-the-cia-mainstream-media-propaganda-and-the-contras-fueled-the-crack-cocaine-epidemic/5629132 https://www.globalresearch.ca/crack-and-the-contras-how-the-... [1]https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fbi-is-involved-in-jeffrey-epstein-cover-up-x6b3fxgm9 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fbi-is-involved-in-jeffre...
- jachee 7y ago
  Lawful Evil, so to speak.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    That alignment is over-represented in the federal government.
mirimir 7y ago
That's a standard tactic. I mean, the FBI ran Playpen, a Tor onion site for sharing CP, for almost two weeks, while dropping phone-home malware on users' devices. Edit: I forgot to include a link.[0] And this was just one operation. I suspect that there are teams at the FBI that specialize in CP operations. 0) https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qkj8vv/the-fbis-unprecedented-hacking-campaign-targeted-over-a-thousand-computers https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qkj8vv/the-fbis-unprecede...
- seph-reed 7y ago
  I'm not sure if this is what OP meant, but a year is long time. It was literally some teams job to share CP on kik for a whole year. That's a long damn job.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    Everyone at FBI is there voluntarily.
    - rolltiide 7y ago
      living out their dream of sharing CP “Yes, it was I! My machinations lay undetected for years for I am a master of deception”
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Also, for normal people, hardcore amateur CP doesn't really come across as sex. It's mainly about punishment, humiliation and touture. So in that sense, I suspect that it's easier to live with.
not_a_cop75 7y ago
Many US agencies have full access to "private" messaging services. Don't be fooled into thinking anything is really private.

edude03 7y ago

Not to diminish the importance of the child abuse but the real problem seems to be "securities fraud" not child abuse, so I'm not sure why the title and the article bring up the child abuse as if it's the reason for the closure?

dooglius 7y ago
There's been child abuse on Facebook too, but it doesn't seem to get the moniker "app plagued by child abuse".
- bepvte 7y ago
  2 months ago, when I last browsed kik, I saw many publicly accessible groups in the browser with titles like "15+ sexy rp"
- Kostchei 7y ago
  Unfortunately from a ex-LEO perspective, it has been very popular with children and heavily hunted by sex offenders, at least in the communities I served in. Doing digital forensics, almost every police officer in a child protection case would be asking "can we get the kik history off that phone?" Not be cause they were guessing but based on experience or admissions by the victim. Part of the seedy underbelly that 75% of the community don't get exposed to. People found it hard to believe when these sort of network-related offences occurred in churches too. Some religious groups are/were more prone to it than others, often based on opportunity or expectations.
dang 7y ago
Ok, we've replaced the article title with a phrase from the first sentence.

jonathankoren 7y ago

The weird thing about Kik was that everyone I met that used it thought it had some sort automatic message deletion like Telegram, but I don't think it did. Old messages would stay forever.

wang_li 7y ago
That’s not the case. After a certain number of messages in a chat, old ones disappear.
djsumdog 7y ago
Messages were stored to the device. If you installed and logged into Kik on another device, the chat history would clear.

quickthrower2 7y ago

... but will it take out a bunch of NPM packages with it?

choward 7y ago
At least they brought attention to how bad it was to rely on NPM. If anyone doesn't remember, this is how the whole left-pad issue started: https://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-npm https://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-np...
- asveikau 7y ago
  Off-topic, but pretty crazy that the timestamp of that blog post doesn't appear until the end, so you can be reading an article from 2016 and not immediately know that this was a few years ago.
  - laughinghan 7y ago
    All of tumblr works like that. Not defending, just contextualizing, and clarifying that NPM didn't make that specific design choice. Obviously, they chose to use tumblr, though.
    - vxNsr 7y ago
      Well at the time tumblr was the blog platform of choice, now I'm sure they'd use medium
- gyrgtyn 7y ago
  No one seemed to remember during the Chef thing!
- soneca 7y ago
  > "Given two packages vying for the name kik, we believe that a substantial number of users who type npm install kik would be confused to receive code unrelated to the messaging app with over 200 million users." So apparently the former Kik package would have outlived the company Kik despite its number of users.

giancarlostoro 7y ago

> "While we are ready to take on the SEC in court, we underestimated the tactics they would employ. How they would take our quotes out of context to manipulate the public to view us as bad actors. How they would pressure exchanges not to list Kin. And how they would draw out a long and expensive process to drain our resources." Anything you say, can and WILL be used against you in a court of law. Without good lawyers you are screwed. Careful what you say publicly and to officers or anybody like the SEC. Bring a lawyer, discuss your battle plan. If a cop says only guilty people need lawyers you pay no attention to such ignorance. Lawyer the hell up.

thinkingkong 7y ago
Whats makes you think they didnt have lawyers the entire time?
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Good lawyers would likely not have provided advice suggesting this course of action.
  - echelon 7y ago
    > this course of action Which course of action? Closing? Doing an ICO?
    - wavefunction 7y ago
      Air-dropping financial instruments to minors.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
ed_elliott_asc 7y ago
An old adage, “only guilty people talk”. Shut up , don’t say anything and you’ll probably walk.

criddell 7y ago

What was the $1B valuation based on? It seems absurd.

fouc 7y ago
Whatsapp. Slack. Any chat app with sufficient user base seems to end up with multi-billion valuation.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  This almost fees like the valuation was based upon the probability Facebook might buy them?
thesausageking 7y ago
The $1B valuation was for their last round which was a $50m investment by Tencent, the company behind WeChat. The investment was more about a partnership between the companies than the economics. At the time, Kik's CEO said: "Today, there are only five other companies in the world that see the future like we do: Tencent, Line, Facebook, Snapchat, and Telegram. One of them owns the largest internet market in the world. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with them as we run this race."
- criddell 7y ago
  I even wonder how Tencent thought Kik was worth $50m. That seems absurd.
  - thesausageking 7y ago
    When Tencent invested, it had 300m users including 40% of teenagers in the US, and were growing fast. For Tencent (which makes WeChat), it's worth it to spend 0.03% of their market cap to partner with a fast growing app in the US market.
tgv 7y ago
I've discovered a foolproof way to make billions of dollars and take controlling interest in the major corporation of your choice. I'll share my secret with you, since I'm all done using my system (hint: if you want to buy any corporation known by three capital letters... forget it.). Step 1: Find somebody you trust to work with you as your partner. Your wife is a good choice, although in a pinch your pet hamster will suffice. Step 2: Create a dot.com company. Building a company with strong technical underpinnings and lead by a passionate and visionary leader is best. However, you can also cycle through e-<word>.com, choosing <word>'s from the dictionary until you find one which isn't used. Whatever. If you find all the names are used, try the dictionary of a foreign language. Step 3: Go public! Issue 1,000,000,000 shares of stock. Keep 999,999,999 shares for yourself, and sell the other share. Step 4: Have your partner buy that share for $100. Step 5: Party!!!!! You now have a $100 billion market cap. Make sure you give interviews to Time, WSJ, and so forth. (If you don't understand why you have a $100 billion market cap, please close your AOL account and go back to your day job; this system isn't for you.) Step 6: Buy the company of your choice, using your $100 billion in stock. (Note: avoid companies created using this system.) Step 7: Retire. You've worked hard, and you deserve it. (edit: source unknown, found on r.h.f a long time ago)

SolarNet 7y ago

Most apps have child abuse problems. Of all the examples of how modern corporations externalize risk and internalize profits, I think the child abuse for ad revenue on content is particularly egregious (one example link here is that the children are the viewers and consumers of the ads (advertising to children being worth more money in many contexts), and the child abusers post massive amounts of content that children will consume (and hence watch the ads on), which the abusers then leverage into contact (and from there abuse); there are plenty of examples). Google researched this, it would take 30,000 employees to manage their communities against child abuse effectively (not watch all content; a mistake people always seem to make when I say this). This would be about a fourth of youtube's suspected profits, so of course that isn't happening. Instead relying on machine learning and other clever solutions which are either ineffective or make the problem worse (youtube heroes for example). Tumblr had similar problems and got temporarily banned from app stores over it. They of course banned all NSFW content, which didn't actually fix the problem (notably the beacon posts, and their crappy design (click share on child pornography to report it), and the ease of access to children; problems that Kik shares as it happens). And lets not even get started on the easily accessible chat rooms and online games targeted at children (quick, how hard is it to make a chat app, download some shitty cartoon graphics, and access a webcam? what like a day of effort? yeaaa... search "kid" and "chat" see what comes up, go on, I'll wait). I would say that this would be a way to disrupt the chat market, but I don't even think anyone cares (worse than that, it will probably come off as idiotic, "kids are early adopters" anyone?). People will care when it comes to invading privacy: "think of the children" will be used to introduce stricter controls like it always has. But children are being harmed by companies that actively invade our privacy already (and hence cooperate with the powers that be), they get a free pass because it was never really about the children. Of course the irony is that this app wasn't shut down because of child abuse problems, but because of financial/regulation problems and a pivot. Running a cryptocurrency actually probably does have less criminal risk (and for that matter moral hazard) than running a chat platform (which is an insane statement, but that's where we are). The only sorta-workable solution I have (that isn't stricter regulation of tech companies and chat platforms) for this issue is federation. Creating local chat platforms backed by local moderators (who have a stake in a positive platform) tied to real people (removing anonymity at the local level, but keeping pseudo-anonymity on the broader internet, but then you also know your system admin), this should overall encourage better behavior. But also children can be restricted to the local community (where it is safe, and they also can't make a nuisance of themselves), the federation would bring them content they could comment on and discuss with their friends (e.g. they could watch and comment on their favorite youtuber's videos, but conversations would be kept local). And of course a parent could white list remote friends, and communities can have "penpal" or "sister" communities that they whitelist in their entirety because they have close ties. Mastodon and other open federated social media platforms are working towards things like this. This of course comes back to the parental control issue (most notably that parents suck at using them). But the point I would make is that such systems would be community backed, and offer better parental controls. Mixing in things like community ran game servers, document clouds, and so on would also do wonders.

smallgovt 7y ago

Sorry but it’s hard for me to believe an app with so many users is just going to close down for a reason that’s largely tangential to the strength of its core business. It’s much more likely this is a ploy to get the SEC or other litigating parties to settle for a smaller amount.

mikepurvis 7y ago
But do those users actually make the app any money? If not, there may not be a lot of real value there? Or at least, not enough to interest the kind of buyers capable of taking on the technical and social maintenance required.
davidgerard 7y ago
The messaging service has been haemorrhaging money its entire existence. Kik has never made money. The crypto scheme was a Hail Mary pass. Now it's the only hope they have.

Deimorz 7y ago

This is just Forbes blogspam of the original blog post: https://medium.com/@tedlivingston/moving-forward-boldly-with-kin-ec6290a6453 https://medium.com/@tedlivingston/moving-forward-boldly-with... It was submitted to HN here, and I noted that it would be unlikely to get attention because of its title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21055034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21055034 HN's strict title rules encourage submitting blogspam that writes sensationalized titles like this (and it's even been dialed back now).

SolarNet 7y ago
Except it adds context about the child abuse on Kik and some of the issues facing it. It's half blogspam, but it isn't entirely.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
jessaustin 7y ago
Maybe my reading comprehension could improve, but somehow I didn't have the loud "SCAM!" alarm going off in my head the whole time I read the blog... unlike TFA. [EDIT]: Also, "Moving Forward Boldly"? That seems like it would be #2, right below "Our Incredible Journey" on the list of this-must-be-irony titles for startup failure posts.
- sova 7y ago
  Yeah, they're actually going to reduce burn by 85%, have an elite 19 person team, and fight the SEC in court. Seems pretty bold actually.
  - bdcravens 7y ago
    While terminating the app that gave them all of their tech credibility.

Animats 7y ago

Another unregistered security disguised as an ICO. What did they expect? There was this mindset in the "crypto" community that they'd found a way to make "take the money and run" legal. They were wrong. SEC info on ICOs: [1] The SEC has been shutting down about one ICO operation a week, starting with the really sleazy ones.[1] It's possible to have a legit token that's not a security, but it has to mostly be used for something like buying music or games, and not primarily cashed out as a speculative investment. You can ask the SEC for a "no action letter" for a legit token. The latest thing is virtual reality world ICO tokens. See "Decentraland" and "Sominium Space". They're both frantically trying to put enough reality behind their virtual worlds that they can argue that their "blockchain based virtual land sales" are to people who want to use the VR world, not to people who want to flip virtual land. Howeycoins: https://www.howeycoins.com https://www.howeycoins.com [1] https://www.sec.gov/ICO https://www.sec.gov/ICO [2] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-actions https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...

bradhe 7y ago

If anyone reading this works on Forbes’ web team: Your page hijacking ads and modals begging me to “sign up” are just destroying the reading experience. Please, fix your shit before you ask people for money!

primitivesuave 7y ago
I am a bit concerned by how I didn't even notice reading the article through only four exposed lines on the page while blocking out 80% of the space that had been taken over by ads popping in from all sides. It's become so commonplace that I've developed some kind of subconscious process to deal with it.
quickthrower2 7y ago
Oh it's horrendous. Slide up notification appears from the bottom, then 1 second later blue IBM ad covers screen (no X button as far as I can tell). Then another popup appears above the IBM ad with an ad. I close the bottom and popup and the IBM goes by itself, and a video to the left starts autoplaying (thankfully muted!). I scroll down and some animated ads dynamically appear on the right, followed by the big blue IBM ad covering the screen again. To the URL bar I march... https://outline.com/djgeH2 https://outline.com/djgeH2
jessaustin 7y ago
Are you really browsing without uBlock Origin? Yikes. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

swiley 7y ago

Ok so I've used kik for years (I have a pen pall in Germany, we both went through the transition to and from university together.) Their app was delay tolerant and had decent read receipts which was amazing when I lived in the country side with my parents and had a worthless internet connection. That being said... kik never built a desktop application, if you didn't have your phone you couldn't even know if you had a message waiting. Even if you went through the trouble to run an android emulator it deleted all your messages each time you switched devices. Kik got pretty caught up in the whole bot thing, and kept cutting the legs out from the third party developers that was stupid. They were so weird about groups, and the 50 person limit per group made them pretty useless when combined with the reputation the app had. discourd really kind of ate their lunch (and personally I really don't like discourd but at least I can connect to it with pidgen and join the popular groups.) EDIT: oh its for securities fraud with their stupid crypto currency that literally no one used? That's dumb.

unicornfinder 7y ago
The lack of a desktop app really hurt it in my eyes, but to be honest I think it was really just killed by the fact that WhatsApp, Telegram etc are downright better (and most people are pretty happy just using Facebook anyway).

lemagedurage 7y ago

One and a half year ago, I built an (unofficial) bot, Ragebot [0], that would function as spam protection for the many bot accounts joining public Kik groups. The project took off and was added to hundreds of thousands of groups by Kik users. Two days ago, Ted Livingston announced the closure and Kik has been chaos throughout ever since, with people adopting Discord and Telegram to retain their online friend circles. One way in which Kik stood out from other popular chat clients was the ability to search for public groups. Even though this feature came with some amount of darkness, people could easily find peers with common interests and make friends. It's a real shame that this platform has to go. At the moment not much information is available beyond Ted's original blog post, I hope more clarification will follow soon. [0] https://ragebot.net https://ragebot.net

landonxjames 7y ago
>Even though this feature came with some amount of darkness I could guess at what you mean, but don't want to be wrong. Could you elaborate on what kind of darkness you were referring to?
- jachee 7y ago
  Groups of—shall we say—fringe interests of dubious (or outright extra-) legality.
scoot 7y ago
I'm confused. Not a Kik user, but how are public groups a unique feature (compared to say Subreddits)?
- injaki 7y ago
  OP meant searchable public group. In discord you need an invite link, and there's no way to search by its name.
  - lytedev 7y ago
    But I believe you can search for subreddits as well? The same is true on BAND with searchable, public, joinable communities.

dvt 7y ago

I don't really understand how they screwed this one up. I don't really think their closure has much to do with the child abuse stuff (Snapchat had their fair share of controversies), but rather their focusing on their nonsense ICO -- not sure if this was idealism, stupidity, or greed. Kik filled a fantastic niche shared by both WhatsApp and Snapchat (and to a lesser extent Instagram), how did they drop the ball?

grawprog 7y ago
>Kik filled a fantastic niche shared by both WhatsApp and Snapchat (and to a lesser extent Instagram), how did they drop the ball? Kik actually provided something WhatsApp (I'm not sure about Snapchat) didn't: the ability to chat fairly anonymously without needing to provide a phone number. It sure was full of bots though.

chx 7y ago

Cryptocurrencies are scam. End. This is very simple. Yes, they are a new kind of scam, a good name suggested is Nakamoto Scheme. https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/ https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/ Also notable: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-but-bitcoin-is-like-the-early-internet/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu... which doesn't outright call it a scam but certainly points out > Git gives you pretty much everything offered by the business case for blockchains. The one thing it doesn’t do is add a ridiculously wasteful proof-of-work mechanism for who’s allowed to add transactions to the <del>blockchain</del> repository. Multiple examples of actually useful software branded “blockchain” turn out to be simplified versions of Git. > Git was released in 2005, four years before Bitcoin — none of the good ideas in blockchains are new, and none of the new ideas have turned out to be much good.

dpc_pw 7y ago
What a nonsense you have there. :D
- JoachimSchipper 7y ago
  This is not a high-quality response; please be polite, and point out any actual errors you see.
coralreef 7y ago
Right. I'm going to challenge you to: - prevent or reverse any of my transactions - confiscate my bitcoin, or even find out how much I have You can't, and never will. Some cryptocurrencies are scams. But if you're saying all cryptocurrencies are scams, you're simply saying math and economics are a scam.
- quaquaqua1 7y ago
  Agreed. Certain banks are scams. Certain coins are scams. The technical layer is entirely separated from the business layer.
- 7y ago

colechristensen 7y ago

Wow. People are ridiculous about cryptocurrencies and the SEC's authority to regulate securities (and decide what a security is). To have an enormously engaged platform with a moderation problem and a cryptocurrency with an SEC problem and to pick the SEC problem is ... I'm sorry for the workers, their families, and their investors that they're losing their jobs and the work they put into the platform will just be gone because the founders have dreams about money laundering and securities fraud (and delusions about labeling what they are doing as something else).

bytematic 7y ago
Great point since it was a well functioning large messaging platform. That's not easy, a ton of work went into marketing, engineering, and strategy to get to this point. All that thrown away, yikes.
lallysingh 7y ago
It's text chat. They're sending strings between web browsers with a server in the middle. Google releases 5-10 new chat services a year. They don't have much to keep them afloat outside of moatless-popularity. Their position was always incredibly fragile. A few small bumps is all that's needed by to take them out. They didn't recognize that and fell over.
dehrmann 7y ago
I bet the core business was in trouble, so they downsized, threw a Hail Mary, and are pitching it as a pivot. Odd that they didn't try to sell the core product, though.
- colechristensen 7y ago
  It seems like their plan for monetizing it had been going on a long time and failed to get them off the runway before it ended so now they're doubling down on the monetization but dropping the platform it was supposed to monetize.
- davidgerard 7y ago

arthurcolle 7y ago

Next up Telegram! TON whitepaper was full of so much nonsense that its hard to even comprehend any alternative basis in reason outside of "moneygrab!"

davidgerard 7y ago
I admired the way that for the TON offering, Telegram very specifically gouged only a few very rich investors who totally had all the knowledge and information they needed to know better, and nobody else. I understand (from industry gossip) that most of the Telegram TON VCs have already written it off.

sequoia 7y ago

Does this mean we can add leftpad back to npm?

nikolay 7y ago

Kik, Telegram, and Skype has a spam issue. Until they solve it, they are doomed. I have "nikolay" on Telegram and get tends of messages from scammers daily. Same with Skype, and Kik. I don't get spam on Viber and Messenger and that's why I use those. All the rest are not worth my time although I love both Telegram and Skype more than the rest, but don't have the nerves to deal with their basic design issues.

reilly3000 7y ago
It seems more appropriate to me to start punishing spammers rather than holding platforms accountable for their customer’s behavior.
- untog 7y ago
  Who is going to punish the scammers if not the platforms?
- mschuster91 7y ago
  Good luck trying to punish someone in Macedonia, Nigeria or whatever other place that has Internet but no legal support agreement with a Western state.
- nikolay 7y ago
  Guess what happened - I kept blocking every offender and suddenly Microsoft locked me out of my account for more than 2 weeks. My Outlook, my Xbox, my Office, and many other paid services - gone! Why? Because, according to them, I had hundreds of blocked people! Well, there's no way to report for spam or scam - you can either delete a chat (they can message you again) or block them. At least these are the options on desktop. Skype has my contacts synced - why I don't have an option to block any contact from a person who's not in my contacts?! Or at least put them in second queue like Facebook Messenger does? Or allow messages only from people with verified phone? Of course, Skype is guilty as they don't bother to solve this problem.

kizer 7y ago

Too many people sharing nudes (their own and not their own) and other pornography; for those normal people who stay 50+ miles away from the "chans". Also, I agree with other that spam is cancerous in these messaging apps. Think about how much spam your email client filters; "publicly addressable" apps need the same logic.

jo-wol 7y ago

npm must return the kik project to Azer now! https://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-npm https://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-np...

rk06 7y ago
I came here for this. In fact, that fiasco is the only reason I recognize Kik the company.

chataway 7y ago

side note with the downfall of Kik, If anyone has experience with building group chat apps that scale, or is solid with react native, I am building a group chat app that eliminates the need to have invite codes or an admin to regulate who comes in to the group chat. People with association are in, randos cant even see the group exists. Basic MVP with messing is already done, made with react native. Just need help with adding images, some login stuff, make it look a tad slicker, and most of all, the on going backend tweaking. yes the world need yet another messaging app. email is in the profile.

cj 7y ago
Why create a throwaway account to solicit contributors to your chat app? Comes across as sketchy.
- chataway 7y ago
  I am a regular HN reader. I just would prefer to not make it public just yet, hence the throwaway. I am based in the Bay Area, happy to meetup with whoever thinks they might be interested in joining the project and has skills. (or skype if someone is outside the bay) edit: I see two posts calling post/idea sketchy, I will maybe choose my wording better next time, and I promise it isn't.
SQueeeeeL 7y ago
Soooooo people are just supposed to give you very expensive highly specific consulting... And you don't seem to value your product much or have a specific technical idea how to proceed. 10/10 Hackernews today
johntiger1 7y ago
> I am building a group chat app that eliminates the need to have invite codes or an admin to regulate who comes in to the group chat. People with association are in, randos cant even see the group exists. Curious as to how you'll make the last point work. Seems a little sketchy to me
k_vi 7y ago

somebodythere 7y ago

So Kin, according to Kik, is not a security, but a utility token. Now that Kik is dead, what's "utility" about it? They should have stuck to calling it a security.

penispooper 7y ago

i've been waiting for the bubble to burst for some time

StanislavPetrov 7y ago

Another unicorn goes extinct.

throwaway4729 7y ago

Kik is super common among certain online kink communities, it’ll be interesting to see where they move to. And given the underage problem those communities constantly have I wouldn’t find it at all hard to imagine Kik having some pretty grim stuff going on particularly in their new-ish group chats.

jugg1es 7y ago

Forbes is totally unreadable. Even when you ignore the side-bar ads, you then get a new one 30 seconds into the visit that slides in over-top the text you are reading. What has the internet become.