Ask HN: What Happened to Yik Yak? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Happened to Yik Yak?

9 pointshershyb_8 comments

I'm still a little confused about what happened to Yik Yak. I would love to have an app like that right now especially during quarantine, but it seems like they had a bullying issue. Do you think this would still be a problem today/any way around this?

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It died off really sharply when they started enforcing "username" instead of "anonymous" - previously posts just got a random icon/avatar next to the message.

FWIW, it was never pseudonymous or anonymous. You could retrieve persistent identifiers for everyone, including phone numbers, GPS, etc. if you sniffed the request. They logged everything, verified non-VoIP numbers, and all.

Probably they were somewhat forced to do it for monetization purposes but it literally died overnight at my university when they started enforcing usernames.

it seems like it might be worth trying to build something similar now?

I'm still surprised no one has retried the Yik Yak strategy (anon, local, snapchat-esque points). I remember how popular it was on uni campuses in my country.

How would you do it differently? Is it possible to have a geolocated, anonymous speech app, or would it just turn into 4chan?

Personal experience: I remember when this happened, their offices were in the same atrium as ours in Atlanta. Many people leaving with boxes, lots of tears, and a lot of anger. We use to watch their team building meetings outside, and I think they all really believed in what they were building.

Life is weird. Pets.com sounded like the dumbest idea in 1999, but I get my pet stuff auto delivered from Chewy and Amazon every month.

Reboot it if you have conviction, times have changed, and will change. I still have ideas that absolutely no one believes in and hasn’t been solved for over a decade now. Who the fuck knows? Reboot Yik Yak.

Yik Yak was made in a pre-Trump internet era.

The bullying issue would be 100x times worse today.

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