- According to Crunchbase, Yik Yak had raised $73.4 million in venture funding since it was founded in 2013, with a valuation approaching $400 million in 2014, its halcyon days.
The app faced problems that were predictable for any forum offering users anonymity and a means of chatting with one another. It was plagued by cyberbullies of every kind and even banned by some schools. But all the capital and advice in the world couldn’t help it maintain its buzz.
In 2015, Yik Yak had to admit to users that they were only masked from each other, not police officers or other authorities with a warrant. And then in 2016, security researchers with NYU, led by computer scientist and professor Keith Ross, found other ways to hack users’ personally identifiable information out of Yik Yak. Around the same time, their CTO bailed.
I liked Yik Yak. I downloaded it to offer specials to the local college kids. I'd say that there was a ratio of about 10 positive and 90 banal comments to each negative. I suppose that the students at the rich, sheltered and Catholic school near my house might have been much kinder than the kids at other universities.
When I was in Boulder, in early 2015, that's when the Yak scene was exploding. 8bit was right, that city has some serious racism issues. Rich, white pricks in general, really. Surprisingly high amount of ignorance, in the CU Boulder college kids.
Ya know, it is your use case that makes me wish Twitter had a "Local Only" option I could turn on and off. I'd love to be able to get/see local information in tweet-sized tidbits. Like your promotions. Or hairy traffic, or weather events. Seems like Yik Yak might have offered that kind of hyper-local, hyper-focused content. But... that's a FEATURE. Not a $400m app. Silly Valley. Trix are for kids.
personally, I think that twitter should allow unlimited characters in posts (to whiten technical limits) and only show the first 140 and then you have to click "expand" it would help with the triviality, and tweetstorms could become actual proper blog posts
I liked it too. I live very near to UNC campus and there were a few times that I heard their alarm going off, campus wide. I would jump on Yik-Yak and find out immediately what was going on. "Gun on campus" or "Knife on Campus, lock doors, stay inside." "Suspect found. Safe to go outside again." -Good to know stuff.
If you are building a social app to make money, you must have the monetization functionality incorporated from the beginning. To do otherwise is to build inertia against those future efforts all along the way. Of course, the trick is that growth is all you and VC need to get to the next round of bag-holding, and users don't consider sustainability when choosing a network, so...
I think it was Ben Horowitz, in his startlingly self-fellating high-fivin'-white-guy autobiography, who observed that venture capital funds anticipate a payoff from one in a hundred investments, and that they expect that one in a hundred to more than make up for the rest. Which gives lie to your imperative: there's nothing saying you must have the monetization functionality incorporated from the beginning. After all, Google didn't and look where that got them. And besides - Jerry Yang at Yahoo didn't have the vision to imagine the monetization which is why they didn't buy Google for a million dollars backintheday! Cautionary tale! Cautionary tale! So what you get is this bottomless sea of money sniffing around going "is there slightly better than one in a hundred odds of you making my money back someday, somehow, don't care?" and rewarding preposterous bullshit like Juicero with $120m in funding. ...and having written that, let's take a step back: A company selling juice, with a supply chain, physical product and stuff people actually had to pay for got $50m more than Yik Yak. And it was a semi-absurd product, and they didn't really think things through, but Yik Yak had a fucking app. THAT'S IT. And I look at this, and I think about the swarthy Russian doctor who came to my house to draw my blood and take my blood pressure as part of the physical I needed to get the life insurance the bank required so that they would loan me $350k for a fuckin' brick'n'mortar buildout that they're guaranteed a 4% yearly return on and I wonder how much better the world would be if guys like cgod and me could tell a VC fund "yeah, we think the odds of this not crashing and burning and blowing up all your money is a little better than 1%" and be fucking showered in money while assholes that want $73m to stake an anonymous hate messenger would have to stake their fucking blood in it and sweet jesus, I really want airborne rabies to break out in Silicon Valley.
I didn't follow their business story, but when I logged for the first time a loooong time,maybe a little over a year ago, and they were like "HEY!! we're doing usernames now and you can see anywhere's Yaks, and we're adding pictures and...", I was like "Ahhahahahah, you're done, you're DONE!!". They failed to capitalize on the very thing the app got popular for: anonymity. Probably because anonymity on the internet is almost never profitable. Have you seen anyone discuss the possibility that deteriorating conditions in universities might be a thing that keeps brain power in the Valley? Looks pretty good over there.
That's like saying my daughter failed to capitalize on flying by leaping into the air and flapping her arms. Anonymity will never make anyone any money because it brings out the worst in people. And I'll go against the grain by saying that local apps won't, either. NextDoor requires real names, sends you a postcard to verify you live where you live, and on and on and on. NextDoor is good for: - putting up ads for shit you're too lazy to craigslist and expecting someone to bite - freaking out about Mexicans you saw parked in front of your house that are obviously part of a theft ring - griping about that tax levy that passed overwhelmingly - complaining about how your neighbor's dogs bark loudly or cat howls at night By the time I'd bailed, there was one semi-useful thread about where to find good Mexican. It had 130 comments. Five restaurants were discussed. They failed to capitalize on the very thing the app got popular for: anonymity.
In Oakland, it's pretty much turned into a OPD PR mouthpiece.
"Our cybers branch has a mole, a deep embed (code jockey), with snooping tools that already has logged your Internet codes, @fuckTheSPD69doggy, and I can tell you right now that (1/2)"
"you had better take this all very seriuosly. (2/2)"
I'm at the shoelace part, and I'm already absolutely dis-fucking-gusted. Dark :(. I'm not sure I can continue, the ending has already been foreshadowed both here and in the narrative, and this is really fucked up. Too many sad feels for me, right now. I dunno how to combat it except everyday vigilance.