Yik Yak Lays Off 60 Percent of Employees As Growth Collapses (theverge.com) 71
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Yik Yak has laid off 60 percent of employees amid a downturn in the app's growth prospects, The Verge has learned. The three-year-old anonymous social network has raised $73.5 million from top-tier investors on the promise that its young, college-age network of users could one day build a company to rival Facebook. But the challenge of growing its community while moving gradually away from anonymity has so far proven to be more than the company could muster. Employees who were affected were informed of the layoffs Thursday morning, sources told The Verge. Yik Yak employed about 50 people, and now only about 20 remain, the company said. The community, marketing, design, and product teams were all deeply affected, one source said. Atlanta-based Yik Yak was founded in 2014 by Furman University students Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington. The app updated the concept of dorm newsletters for the mobile era, letting anyone post comments about school, their campus, or life in general. The fact that comments were anonymous initially helped the app grow, as it encouraged more candid forms of sharing than students might otherwise post on Facebook or Instagram.
Re: Well, at least someone made money (Score:1)
Cry me a river. It is almost always the investors and founders who make money on bullsh*t IPO first-day trading, and the workers on the ground who were offered stock options that can't trade for months (or years) after IPO, that get screwed. Salaries usually don't include weeks of unpaid overtime.
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In the case of my employer, lots of people got heavily burned by options when they got taxed on their value at the grant time (during the tech bubble) followed by the stock plummeting and all the options being worthless. That was the beginning of the end for options for the rank and file.
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and the workers on the ground who were offered stock options that can't trade for months (or years) after IPO, that get screwed.
You don't know how IPOs work. When the company I worked for went IPO, any employees that had vested shares had the option to sell shares at the IPO price. Yes, there is a lockout period after the IPO, but anyone that had shares cold sell them if they wanted to. There were a lot more BMWs, Mercedes, and Audis at the company after our IPO, and it wasn't just the founders and executives.
Did the investors ever even use the product? (Score:1)
Last time I used Yik Yak, about a year ago, 3/4 of the posts were variations of either "I'm horny", "yo that blonde/brunette who works at [store] is hot", or "why is this place so slow"?
So.... Yik Yakked? (Score:3)
They Yakked up 3/5 of their staff.
Of course this is the first I've heard of them. That they market to college kids is likely why. I dropped out of college in 1999 to go into tech.
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Looking at the sample content on their website... you didn't miss much.
Re:So.... Yik Yakked? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yik Yak was all the rage for a few months because it was billed as an "anonymous" hyperlocal message board. As soon as the kids figured out that "anonymous" bomb/shooting threats over Yik Yak would still get them arrested, the user base went away. I don't understand how they managed to raise $73.5 million fucking dollars for this; apparently I need an introduction some of these venture capital people...
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Hyperlocal? Does that mean something other than being a buzzword?
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Probably means mum and dad 20 foot away downstairs doing little jonnies dinner while he pretends to be a bad ass on this "anonymous" service.
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Hyperlocal? Does that mean something other than being a buzzword?
For Yik Yak? Actually, yes.
Something like Craigslist is local: there's different subpages for Atlanta vs. Detroit vs. Portland. But it's only local on the "major city" level: you're in a small town 50 miles outside of Denver? Congratulations, you're part of Denver, as far as Craigslist is concerned. The local pages are also not restricted to people in that location. If you're in Santa Fe, you can easily open up the Miami Craigslist and see who's giving away a free sofa.
Yik Yak, on the other hand, takes thin
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Actually from what I understand, they were doing pretty well until they decided to take away the anonymous aspect of their anonymous localized chat rooms. Apparently that was the draw, and when it disappeared, so did their user base.
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It's annoying; but a really stupid investment can be sensibl
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I don't understand how they managed to raise $73.5 million fucking dollars for this
Are you kidding? The app that did nothing but say "Yo" conned some VC morons into giving them a million bucks [techcrunch.com]: “We are fascinated by these uses of simple yes/no, on/off communications tools,” Betaworks co-founder John Borthwick wrote on the Betaworks blog. “As the notification layer becomes the primary interface of alert-based information on your phone — as the OS’s allow navigation and controls in those alerts — there will emerge a new class of applications that mediate
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I don't understand how they managed to raise $73.5 million fucking dollars for this; apparently I need an introduction some of these venture capital people...
It's impossible to predict who is and isn't going to make it so even losers still sometimes manage to get cash. It's just a wild guess by the VC people that maybe they'll make it. I very vaguely remember back in the internet boom of the 1990s that USA Today profiled a handful of start up companies over a long period. The only company I remember, and I don't remember their name at all, was some company that had this crazy idea of (if I remember correctly) doing something like representing websites by plan
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It distracted kids in schools and got used for bullying etc. It also got picked up by people who wanted to talk to kids in schools, which is not good either. Yik Yak blocked the app at schools in the U.S....
https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/13/amid-vicious-bullying-threats-of-violence-anonymous-social-app-yik-yak-shuts-off-access-to-u-s-middle-high-school-students/ [techcrunch.com]
"As for how the blocks will affect Yik Yak’s user growth, the company isn’t concerned, saying that the app is still doing
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I blame the blipverts ... (Score:1)
... and Halliburton, but mostly the blipverts.
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... and Halliburton, but mostly the blipverts.
Yeah, after the first couple of students exploded - interest in the social network understandably waned.
Edison Carter's expose probably didn't help either.
What is Tik Tak? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ohh Sorry Yik Yak, I thought it was talking about a knock off breath mint candy....
But seriously... I have no clue what the damn app is, even visiting the page... wtf is a 'herd' ?
*Edit before posting*: So I realized the biggest issue with the damn site... it uses that "web 3.0" nonsense design philosophy where the top of the page is nothing but a picture, and so I had no clue wtf it was talking about... because the page IMHO purposely hides relevant information that ACTUALLY explains what it is...
Apparently a (and I could be wrong) a super local social media app, that allows you to be a hipster knowing what is going on in the coffee shop 3 blocks down from you... "so you can know about it before it is 'cool' ".... or something...
Edit 2: captcha is 'readable' ...catcha gods love irony today
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Ohh Sorry Yik Yak, I thought it was talking about a knock off breath mint candy....
But seriously... I have no clue what the damn app is, even visiting the page... wtf is a 'herd' ?
Apparently the founders were fully aware that their only potential market would be actual sheeple...
Anonymous social network? (Score:2)
"Anonymous platform moving away from anonymity" (Score:5, Insightful)
That sounds a plan as a smart as youtube moving away from videos or sourceforge/github wanting to move away from "that open source thing".
Re:"Anonymous platform moving away from anonymity" (Score:4, Interesting)
The world is pretty full of message boards and chat apps; and the combination of proximity filtering and 'anonymity' produces a really, really, low-value environment. Because of the geographic boundaries, it's useless for any of the 'connecting with other enthusiasts of my weird and potentially embarassing hobby/fetish/etc' applications of anonymity, since you can only interact with people in a fairly small area around you; but since it purports to be anonymous(obviously, an application running on your phone with location data mandatory isn't anonymous at all from the perspective of the company operating the service) it mostly attracted the...high quality comments... that people wanted to make about each other; but weren't willing to say to your face.
Shockingly, people's appetite for that appears to be limited; and the most enthusiastic users are the people most likely to drive the rest of the users away and generate enough unpleasant stories to spook potential advertisers.
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I bet was the diaper fetishists.
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Because of the geographic boundaries, it's useless for any of the 'connecting with other enthusiasts of my weird and potentially embarassing hobby/fetish/etc' applications of anonymity, since you can only interact with people in a fairly small area around you;..
So that's why I never heard of it in the ham radio forums.
Did they try to make an app out of FRS radios?
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Yep.
Enforcing cultlike behaviors is indeed a much better business model, as you create a safe space for their congregations.
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Not as much as Ms.Sarkeesan did in her several kickstarters to deliver 3 or so youtube videos taking several years to do so.
A company I never heard of goes tits up (Score:3)
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And I care because?......
You bring a strong point.
In light of the point of this entire story, I just came here to say that.
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meh (Score:3, Informative)
As a previously avid user (great shitposting app)
meh.
They gimped anonymity a while back anyway and people fled.
They wanted more data to sell, basically.
$73M for 50 people? (Score:2)
It's about scalability (Score:5, Informative)
Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington? (Score:3)
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I Tried YikYak (Score:2)
I tried YikYak and I still fire it up maybe once a week - to post content from the perspective of a bear, which is kind of fun. I raided some lady's bird feeder last week and told everyone all about it.
But I live out in a semi-rural area. One of YikYak's problems is that it only has content if you're near other people that post content. I, myself, posting maybe once a week, am about 25% of the content in my area. The other 70% is people looking for marijuana or sex, with the remaining 5% of people talking a
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More like "closed down" (Score:2)
A friend of mine used to work there until yesterday. He said they closed the place down, more like 95% layoffs. It's gone.
Great 80s movie names (Score:1)
Obviously not the target market (Score:1)
"more candid" (Score:2)
" it encouraged more candid forms of sharing than students might otherwise post on Facebook or Instagram"
That'll make the top-10 list of understatements of the year.