
Thank You, Yakkers - coloneltcb
https://blog.yikyak.com/blog/thank-you-yakkers
======
AndrewKemendo
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](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/yik-yak#/entity)

[2][http://www.businessinsider.com/yik-yak-sells-to-square-
for-3...](http://www.businessinsider.com/yik-yak-sells-to-square-
for-3-million-bloomberg-2017-4)

~~~
nxc18
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.

~~~
nebabyte
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.

~~~
pitaa
>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...](https://blog.yikyak.com/blog/optional-handles-and-hot-feed-are-
back)

~~~
adrusi
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.

~~~
pitaa
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.

------
marcelluspye
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.

~~~
rbobby
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?

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

------
sql12345
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.

~~~
echelon
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.

~~~
pmilla1606
I built this: [https://dropanon.com](https://dropanon.com). Not the same but
similar

~~~
s73ver
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.

~~~
pmilla1606
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.

~~~
nthcolumn
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.

------
grizzles
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?

~~~
balls187
> 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.

~~~
kbos87
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.

~~~
creaghpatr
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.

~~~
nxc18
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.

~~~
nebabyte
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.

------
chambo622
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.

------
The_Sp0iler
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.

------
pg_bot
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.

~~~
nthcolumn
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.

------
itsyogesh
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.

------
whitehat2k9
Looks like the good old-fashioned Facebook confessions pages will be around
for quite a while longer...

------
Moter8
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.

~~~
chki
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.

------
aeriklawson
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.

------
brudgers
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](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.

------
lapsock
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

~~~
smallgovt
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.

~~~
stonogo
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.'

~~~
smallgovt
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.

------
Larrikin
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.

------
safeandsound
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.

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

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

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

------
angersock
What an Incredible Journey!

~~~
Signez
Of course, there is the mandatory tumblr:
[https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](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.

~~~
rhizome
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.

