I remember before Yik Yak arrived on the scene, anonymous ephemeral communication wasn't popular. Sure there's Craiglist, but part of what made Yik Yak popular is that it not only adapted to the way people wanted to communicate, but it refined it. It created a space that was participation only and had an agreed-upon code of conduct.

Hundreds of social apps enter the market every month, but the reason so many fail is because they try to keep up with the standard. Bumble and Happn both tried to replace Tinder, but couldn't because the value of communication hardly changed. Bumble surely gives women more power into the dynamics of online dating, but women not having power was hardly an issue given Tinder's match process. The saturation of refinement has already piqued in that market.

Social apps don't necessarily miss the mark, but rather they fail to predict. We are in an age of ephemeral messaging at the moment but it's a false premise given the increasing control of the police state governments. The next revolution in communication and social apps is going to be off-the-grid communication, where there are no networks or carriers - just end points. Mesh networks and Tor-like nodes are below the surface at the moment, but once that technology moves from software to hardware I predict it's going to bloom (permitting encryption is not outlawed) into dongles you attach to your phone which eventually are sold as features.