Thank You, Yakkers | Hacker News Reader

Thank You, Yakkers

blog.yikyak.com

157 pointscoloneltcb108 comments

Open articleView on HN

https://web.archive.org/web/20170430230219/https://blog.yiky...

https://archive.ph/uDMDY

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

[2]http://www.businessinsider.com/yik-yak-sells-to-square-for-3...

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.

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 :)

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-...

To me this isn't wild but what should (logically, not morally) happen with most tech companies. The microbubble of their own evaluation burst. If you used the app for longer than a month, you knew the app was going nowhere unless they completely changed the entire product by evolving so quickly. A lot of companies have similar problems in my opinion but are propped up by VC evaluations. If they play their cards right, they can cash out before the bubble bursts and get integrated into a product or company that has much more value than themselves. Yik Yak obviously failed there, but I don't think they are much of a unique situation.

Reading the sibling comment to this one, it doesn't sound at all like what happened. But alright

Fair for sure. I think the act that burst their bubble was the aforementioned switch to required handles combined with an already shrinking community at that point in many urban areas who got bored with it. The bigger point of the comment was basically that most tech companies are overvalued and only get bailed out by acquisition. The money isn't really surprising here to me, which was the claim of the parent comment. The interesting part is how royally the fucked up their product to burst the evaluation bubble that quickly.

Yik Yak destroyed their product the moment they introduced handles/names. That move, combined with bowing to pressure from community groups to block & de-anonymize, ruined any trust in the service.

The complete lack of understanding of their own product that they demonstrated was absolutely astounding. $3M almost sounds like too much; there's no reasonable way you can recover anything of value besides the employees in this situation.

I used Yik Yak as a tech observer as recently as 6 months ago, so I'm not unfamiliar with the platform.

That said, it seems extreme to me that two reversible decision could so devastatingly and permanently tank what was a significant userbase ~1.25 MAU.

Other platforms have endured much more with much less money and not been sold off in a fire sale.

At Backplane we sold for way the fuck less for not a much smaller userbase. Tech's wild.

1.25 MAU isn't actually that much for a company with such a fickle userbase. It's a good start, but most of the valuation is still in the growth potential at that stage.

> 1.25 MAU

1.25 anonymous MAU. Unless you're a VPN provider, I can't see anyone monetizing anonymity.

Destroyed, to the tune of 70M?

Surely they could just issue a 'mea culpa' at that point and recommit to their previous direction? In spite of how the web acts, users can be incredibly forgiving as far as 'voting with their wallets' go - at the end of the day they'll just use whatever works, and a 'mea culpa' post would be sufficient for most to 'begrudgingly' resume using the old/familiar service? (I mean, maybe not all of them, but enough to not take such a massive hit...)

Hot damn, adding this to my 'further reading' list.

>Surely they could just issue a 'mea culpa'

They did [1], but that was 3 month later and by then it seems most of their users had moved on and forgotten about them. Plus, being an anonymous app they didn't have emails for their users, so there wasn't really any way for them to get the word out that they were reverting back.

[1] https://blog.yikyak.com/blog/optional-handles-and-hot-feed-a...

I'm pretty sure everyone at my University was aware that they reverted those changes within a month, just by word of mouth. But the people who reinstalled it were greeted with a ghost town and didn't fully re-engage, so it never achieved critical mass.

I don't disagree. But I wonder if the reason it was a ghost town when people reinstalled the app was precisely because it took a month for all the users to hear about it via word of mouth. If they had been able to send an email blast out to all of their users at once, perhaps there would have been enough people reinstalling the app that day to kick start it back into popularity.

Overall I find it a fascinating case study, just because they fell so quickly. If the founders wrote a memoir I would be very interested in reading it.

Easily. Pretty much all of the appeal and audience attraction of Yik Yak was the anonymity and the self-regulating nature of the platform.

Last place I worked was a smaller University and it was tasked to me to keep en eye on the posts due to the potential for harassment. The system was, at the time, 5 down votes immediately cleared a post - the users were very good at moderating themselves while still preserving the rather "raw" nature of the service. People were still wry and biting and uninhibited with their comments, but outright threats and harassment seemed to get moderated pretty well. Ultimately we never intervened (Yik Yak had a system to geo-block regions from accessing the service), and for the most part it was just the equivalent of a bathroom stall wall for most of the students. Hell, often times I'd learn about network issues from Yik Yak posts before I'd get even a hint from my networking team.

You take away the anonymity and the isolating culture, you take away the magic of it. Since our Campus was situated right in the middle of a neighborhood, we'd often get nearby residents trying to participate. According to my student workers who used it, it was almost always obvious who was a student and who wasn't.

Makes sense.

But, maybe it's a case where they knew the negativity (racism, harassment, bullying, etc.) was so bad, they had to do something to curb it, even if it meant destroying the company.

Sounds crazy, even I'm skeptical, but maybe for once somebody chose to do the right thing despite the money at stake. Dunno.

I was a promoter throughout my time using it, turning lots of my friends onto it at its peak. I even have a Yik Yak beer koozie!

The day handles came out was the day I uninstalled.

Most startups go out of business. Raising $ doesn't guarantee success.

I'm not even talking about success - I'm talking about investors looking out for their own money and getting a deal done for a buyout. I wouldn't even really call it a soft landing.

> I wouldn't really even call it a soft landing.

Let me help - you're looking for the phrase, "a cautionary tale."

These investments are intentionally high-risk, though. Most of them go south, including most of those made by famous firms.

I attend a university where YikYak was extremely popular from 2014-2016 (new posts every minute, top posts got >400 upvotes). Getting rid of anonymity was unpopular, but what really killed the app was, right before summer 2016 they eliminated the ability to post to your Herd even when you weren't in the Herd location. People went home for the summer, couldn't post or even view the university Herd, and it died overnight. Didn't help that they also stopped sorting by top (and only by new). When people came back in the fall, everyone had already moved on (now there are only a handful of posts a day, and a couple of likes). People moved to Snap Stories, and now to Facebook Meme pages. There was no way people were going to get back on YikYak, no matter what features they reverted.

Good input. Can you tell me more about the Facebook Meme pages? I mean I can guess, but are those really places to hangout?

Seems like people moving to that defeats the anonymity aspect that people think were the real killer.

I'm not that person, but I think the Facebook meme pages fill a specific niche that Yik Yak had their hands in. Most Universities these days have a "$University Memes" page, filled with "relatable" content. Sometimes talking smack about a particularly tough prof, sometimes making inside jokes about the campus, or local dive bars. Yik Yak had this market cornered for a long time, but because of some dumb decisions it's mostly dead now

And for a large university there'll be meme pages for specific majors.

I just wrote a story in those groups. https://m.mic.com/articles/175420/ivy-league-college-meme-wa...

Whenever I see something like this all I can feel is insanely jealous that I didn't get to go to one of those schools. Their memes are so much better than my commuter school's

The other commenter is generally right, I think. I think what the campus was really drawn to was the idea of a place where you could express unfiltered observations about the campus community. The anonymity of YikYak provided sufficient cover in that regard, but so does the Meme Page. This might sound absurd, but fitting these same observations into meme format almost provides the same amount of cover that anonymity does. Now, the anonymity of YikYak did mean that there were typically many more controversial posts, but those posts almost never got any traction. The Facebook meme page seems to fill the bulk of the void, in terms of broadly appealing, humorous observations about campus culture.

social apps are really hard, no one going to pay more money to acquire a dead app

These no bullshit VC's, in your opinion what did they expect to get out of this? What was the vision? Since most of the value of YikYak seemed to come from the anonimity, this was never going to be the "next facebook".

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.

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?

Imagine you suddenly applied HN's posting etiquette to 4Chan. That's basically how it felt.

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.

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.

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.

In parts of Europe Jodel[1] is pretty popular.

[1] https://www.jodel-app.com

There's Whisper: http://whisper.sh/

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")

I built this: https://dropanon.com. Not the same but similar

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.

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.

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.

It got filled by Facebook.

fb isn't anonymous

We've thrown our hat into the ring: https://www.swiflie.com

Pollen Chat has been around for an Year. For Android only, as of now. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.raynstudios...

I am the creator of the app.

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.

I have made Hoodchat live just today https://hoodchat.io

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

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.

> 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.

> 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?

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.

Bullying is a weird word for "harassment".

> 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."

But you can say, "Jennie Ginger is a slut", and positively identify a real person in real life. Or you could just spout racist epithets.

I'm not sure why I'm positing hypotheticals, when harassment was an actual, ongoing problem:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/09/technology/popular-yik-ya...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/yik-yak-harassment_us_56...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10...

http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/07/technology/yik-yak-universit... - sorry, auto-playing video (fuck you, CNN).

This article is weird; I can't tell if it's blaming the victims, or the colleges, or the institution of college altogether: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/10/yik_yak...

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Honestly, if there were a way for their ads to be displayed there without that being seen as a faux pas (e.g. some fundamental shift in the ad network model that just makes it seem like a consequence of the browsing user's interactions with companies - it wouldn't be 'shockingly viral' news to see that racists/sexists/etc use products too) they probably would not care.

Perception is advertisers' only enemy. Once that's taken care of, they really don't care what kind of person you are as long as your money's green.

Doesn't seem to stop Twitter from selling ads.

Therein lies the problem - even if they figure out how to monetize the audience they have now, "audiences" today are a million times more fickle and temporary. The amount of time a company like this has to recoup losses before it becomes pasé is compressing.

Sell ads.

> One thing I find interesting about this turn of events is that the person shutting the app down is Jack Dorsey

Where did you get this idea? From what I read it's just saying they're shutting down and giving their developers a soft landing onto Square, it's not even one of those "acq-hires".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

HN thread from a few days ago with more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14186699

Why are you so angry? Did they make you force read the post?

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.

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.

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.

Eh dunno, sounded pretty fluffy to me. Dressing up the move to Square as some 'community' thing when it's likely simple pragmatism, and so on. (Though nowhere near as apparently rage-inducing the other guy found it lol.)

Can you show me an example of a goodbye post from a company that sounds less 'fluffy' than this?

There are plenty. Here's a few posted on HN:

RethinkDB was very straight forward: https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/

Wattage too: https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/

Hackpad from a few days ago: https://hackpad.com/

The above make their intentions unmistakably clear in the first line.

Those were good. Thanks for sharing. My standards have been raised.

Why not turn that argument around to yourself?

You should know from ... the 1200+ days you've been around, the huge number of shut down notices in that time, the other posts here, and every single comment that's ever been made about how you should communicate with users, ... that the shutdown notice here isn't great.

> that the shutdown notice here isn't great.

That's your opinion. I disagree with it.

Yeah, no one is trying to get emotional to say goodbye, and this article is useless.

They definitely buried it, but it seemed extremely clear to me that they're shutting it down:

> To that end, we’ll begin winding down the Yik Yak app over the coming week as we start tinkering around with what’s ahead for our brand, our technology, and ourselves.

Why do they think their brand will still meaningfully exist after this?

They might be able to sell it?

Why not show some understanding for the people who worked tirelessly to pursue a common goal that's now come to an end, and their most loyal users who are going to be sad to see it go. As someone else said, nobody forced you to read the "6 shitty paragraphs". It's almost like you're throwing a tantrum at a parent who posted a longwinded obituary in the newspaper for their kid.

Yes, what a selfless act of charity those people undertook in exchange for mere hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Let us have a moment of silence for the millions of man-hours selflessly donated to this organization, which was founded by Mother Theresa herself.

This unassailable high ground certainly warrants six paragraphs of pointless our-incredible-journeying, especially as they go on to describe the future of the organization as 'tinkering around.'

I never alluded to their journey being selfless or charitable...

Just because the team partially did this for profit, doesn't mean they didn't work their asses off and are now sad to shut it down. Nor does it discredit the claim that some of their users are going to be very sad to see it go. That was my point.

People are upvoting it because people were pissed with yikyak. Last I checked (and it was more than a year ago) yikyak was the preferred safespace to be racist on campus. So it is tone deaf only if you are reading this comment alone, but if you know the whole history of the company, this comment hits the right tone it is almost musical.

How many years has it been since people have pointed out twitter is a place where women are being harassed and treated worse like you wouldn't believe. Is the company doing anything about it? Not really. If they did, it would have stopped. I wish twitter also rids itself like this somehow.

We get it, this is a difficult moment for the founders and employees. Having said that, there's nothing wrong with writing candidly instead of assaulting us with marketing speak. If they're trying to spin things at this point, it can be quite annoying to read and I personally would lose a bit of sympathy that I'd otherwise have.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? We're trying to do a bit better than this here.

What an Incredible Journey!

Of course, there is the mandatory tumblr: 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.

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.

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