
Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak - coloneltcb
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-24/square-said-to-acquire-team-from-struggling-social-app-yik-yak
======
huehehue
Bit of a tangent and, for those not familiar, Yik Yak is an anonymous, upvote-
downvote, location-based forum (kinda) where posts are automatically deleted
if they net -5 votes.

In college, I was really interested in how Yik Yak worked and found out that,
given a list of N user ids (which were super easy to generate), one could send
downvote requests to the server and instantly delete any post with a score <=
(N - 5). Infinite loop + pass in a list of locations (e.g. a list of colleges
in the US), and it's pretty darn easy to disable Yik Yak for the entire
country.

There was no location checking to see if a user id was being used in both
Florida and Montana at the same time, and there was no real throttling. I hit
up their support, and tried to reach out to their devs, but I kept getting
brushed off.

Of course this is just one small thing, but I'm not exactly surprised at how
things are turning out if this was the level of interest that the Yik Yak team
showed in their own product.

~~~
pjungwir
A problem I've mused on for a few years is related to this: when a phone
submits a lonlat to an API server, how can you make the server more confident
it can trust the location? I mean with curl I could POST any lonlat I want---I
don't even need a phone! I don't think this is truly solvable, but how can you
make spoofing the location harder?

The scale I'm thinking about is "Are you really in the store you say you're
in?" where all users are from the same fairly dense city. So geolocating the
IP isn't good enough. Accuracy to a city block or two seems good enough
though.

My best idea so far is to submit a list of available wifi access points, and
use that as a "password" to prove that you're where you say you are. If your
list is 80% like the list of other users at that location, we trust you.

Unfortunately in iOS you can't get that list! It requires a private API, so
calling that method will get your app rejected from the store.

Does anyone have any other ideas?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Send temperature and barometric pressure. Temp will vary (inside/outside) but
pressure should be reasonably consistent.

~~~
itake
How is that any more trustworthy? You can probably use the same source the
server would use to verify that information.

Not to mention, most phones may not have those sensors.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Some very popular phones have a barometer[1]. If you are getting data from a
bunch of phones, and most of them are legit, then you'll have a good idea of
where the air pressure 'should' be, and if you get a barometer reading that is
outside that data set by a standard deviation you can probably 'guess' that it
is not coming from a phone at the same lat/lon as the other ones.

[1] [https://www.phonegg.com/list/303-Cell-Phones-with-
Barometer](https://www.phonegg.com/list/303-Cell-Phones-with-Barometer)

~~~
komali2
So users on phones without barometers cannot use your app, and you are
decidedly mobile-only, forever.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Not at all, the question was how to combat or at least estimate fraudulent
'adjustment' of the karma in a location based service. The way to do that is
to take information that is specific to the location, and changes, and provide
that data in the input stream to help understand where your clicks/votes are
coming from. If one in 5 phones has a barometer with a high degree of
probability, then you can use set bounds on the likelyhood that all 5 votes
came from legitimate users. It won't be perfect but it will make it harder for
scammers to scam without being there.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
This is a really clever idea. Do you have sources of information about what
sensors are present in which phones?

------
ynniv
Square has an Atlanta office in Atlantic Station, which is ~ 15 minutes from
where Yik Yak is located in Buckhead. This same Square office previously
picked up the Google Web Toolkit team after Google closed their local office.

~~~
posguy
Huh, well Square seems to be in the right place at the right time to make this
acquisition of talent. I still don't get how Square intends to retain/gain
customers at the price point their at, Mercury, Heartland, etc are eating
their lunch.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Heartland is such an utter piece of garbage. I'd use almost anything before
I'd touch it (or any typical shitty enterprise processor) again.

Source: spent a year helping a client migrate from Stripe to Heartland to save
a few basis points. Things like faxing docs to terrible APIs to constant lies
from sales, who is a bunch of ignorant, rude good ol' boys, just like most of
their competitors. Pure incompetence at virtually every point of interaction.
Literally have not a single good thing to say.

I'd invest a significant part of my net worth in Stripe if I could. They and
companies like them are going to destroy Heartland in the long run, and it
can't come soon enough.

~~~
btown
As someone who's worked with faxed API docs before, that's usually just the
tip of the iceberg of despair. Never again.

~~~
posguy
Yeah, I'd avoid direct integrations entirely, semi-integrated CC/Debit
processing like Pax or Dejavoo is much less painful to implement, and costs
less on hardware too. See my other comment.

------
blizkreeg
I've found _most_ acquihire situations unfair to existing employees. It seems
that those coming in from the acquihire have a higher reward/payout that
talented employees already at the company can never negotiate.

Are the incoming acquihired engineers that much more worth than the ones you
already have? There are certainly exceptions but by and large I can't imagine
this being the case.

~~~
nostrademons
I've seen $1M+/engineer compensation (over a 4-year vesting period) given to
ordinary employees at big companies. It's actually not that out of the
ordinary. One of the things that surprised me about working for a big company
is that the compensation structure is not quite as lopsided (in favor of
acquisitions) as I thought.

There do need to be two conditions met to bring in the big bucks though: 1)
you need to perform, such that your value to the employer is > $1M, and 2)
they need to be afraid of losing you. Many employees fail on one or both
conditions. They either slack off or don't work on the right things (so
they're not actually worth that much), or they're "company men" who will
unquestioningly stay with the company regardless of whether they're
compensated fairly.

~~~
ma2rten
Do you mean $1M per year or over 4 years? 250k per year in total compensation
does not seem like that much.

EDIT: Since I am being downvoted, I thought I'd provide some data to back up
my claim. The average total compensation for a Senior Software Engineer in the
US at Google according to Glassdoor is $267,413.

~~~
exolymph
Google is widely acknowledged to be near the top of the heap w/r/t
compensation.

------
dheera
I loved the idea of Yik Yak, but every time I tried to start a semi-
intelligent conversation I was downvoted to death. And this was smack in the
middle of MIT. I guess the people I was hoping to interact with was exactly
the opposite of the actual user base.

It would be potentially interesting if the upvote/downvote thresholds and
ranking took into account your Facebook or other social graph, and then
extrapolated to other people that might find your posts interesting.

Yik Yak could have been Waze. Yik Yak could have been a tool for students to
ask questions during class when they didn't understand what the professor
said. But it wasn't.

~~~
peruvian
People go on social apps to waste time and have fun. I get your frustration
but it's not surprising no one cares about discourse in Yik Yak.

------
hamandcheese
> The payments processor paid less than $3 million for between five and ten of
> Yik Yak’s engineers

I feel like they could have saved money and created happy engineers by
offering each employee a hefty sign on bonus.

~~~
pjc50
It would be interesting if there were a transfer market in programmers like
there is in footballers, but I don't see it happening any time soon.

(Partly this is because the rules of the game prevent replacing Lionel Messi
with 1,000 cheap non-Western consultants hired through three layers of
outsourcing)

~~~
cheriot
What successful company has been built by "1,000 cheap non-Western consultants
hired through three layers of outsourcing"? We don't need a rule against a
losing strategy

~~~
thaumasiotes
> We don't need a rule against a losing strategy

Interestingly, these are common anyway. Some obvious examples are laws against
suicide, incest, and infanticide.

------
utmachina
I think the key problem was the hype train and the lack of product-
oriented/technical leadership.

remembered them doing very well on campus last two years of college. They had
on campus reps to hand out "schwag"; probably not very fun to scale. The
obvious bullying was the problem. If they had found some way to solve that and
snuck their way back into high schools...

then again, kids can be so cruel.

~~~
pyromine
College student, it was fun for a year or two and then pretty much everyone
gave up on it.

The unique commentary was what made it, there was essentially humor that
everyone could relate to and the unique perspectives people felt were too
uncomfortable to share with their persona attached. It was fascinating to
watch what would come up over the day

~~~
yangmaster
To add onto this, college meme groups on Facebook have largely replaced Yik
Yak's niche in the past year or so. And those don't require millions in VC
funding!

------
ProfessorLayton
Pity, mainly because there seems to be a market for local anonymous
communications, but a relatively small, and very vocal subset of users can
ruin it for everyone.

I wonder if some sort of anonymous reputation system could have saved them
from making product decisions that were counter to the reasons for using the
app in the first place.

~~~
alistproducer2
whisper is a much superior, still alive platform that does the same thing.

~~~
NDT
I really disagree. I've used the app maybe 2-3 years ago and looking at their
website, it doesn't seem like the main UI or features have changed much. If I
didn't know what the app was, going on their website I would think it's a
Buzzfeed clone given all their listicles and clickbaity headlines.

~~~
alistproducer2
Listicles are not how it's mainly used. It's basically a chat app. Most of the
activity on the main feed is people looking to chat. And there are very active
groups.

------
hamandcheese
The phrasing makes it seem like Yik Yak itself is not being acquired. Is that
a thing that ever happens? I doubt square is interested in their tech anyways.

I've heard that the Atlanta tech scene is dominated by business types rather
then techies. It wouldn't surprise me if leadership is selling off most their
engineering team and planning to outsource as needed from here on out.

~~~
alistproducer2
>I've heard that the Atlanta tech scene is dominated by business types...

In ATL, can confirm. That's not to say there aren't good engineers here.

~~~
sdflkd
Can you speak more on the ATL tech scene? I've always been interested.

~~~
frogstomp19
Not OP but I'm a software engineer working for a startup in ATL. I'm not sure
how we have a reputation for being "dominated by business types", but we do
have a relatively high contingent of fintech and b2b companies here (our only
unicorn, Kabbage, plus several others like Square, Salesloft, Salesforce). I
think though that our pool of engineering talent is relatively high - I'd
guess it's the most likely landing spot for good engineers from the southeast.

~~~
noodle
> I'm not sure how we have a reputation for being "dominated by business
> types"

Two things:

1\. Atlanta's tech scene is largely b2b. Its driven a lot by people who worked
in industry and then had a great idea for a company and left. Or serial
entrepreneurs who are capable of building a business but not a product. So a
lot of companies simply originate from "business types" because they're
founded by them, for them.

2\. ATV. ATV strived to make itself the face of the ATL startup scene, and
generally succeeded. But the resources ATV provides are all primarily aimed at
business types - pitch practices, VC events, demo days, and networking
gatherings. And so business types gathered there, since that's a convenient
place to be, and the successful companies went elsewhere due to rising rent.
So now, ATV is largely the face of startups in Atlanta, and yet is a building
filled with "business types" hustling to get their company started or funding
secured. The optics on the startup ecosystem are consequently very heavily
"business types" because everyone tends to just look at ATV as the
thermometer.

~~~
alistproducer2
For those outside ATL, ATV = Atlanta tech village [1]

1: [http://atlantatechvillage.com](http://atlantatechvillage.com)

------
Kpourdeilami
This app used to be very popular on my university campus up until last summer
that they removed the anonymous posting feature! Almost all of their users
were upset and were threatening to leave the app but yik yak didn't take them
seriously. That resulted in them losing 90% of their active users within a few
weeks

They brought back anonymous posting a few months after in a desperate attempt
to bring back the old users but that didn't save them

------
huangc10
> The payments processor paid less than $3 million for between five and ten of
> Yik Yak’s engineers, according to the person.

Classic acquihire scenario?

~~~
EduardoBautista
Are they required to work there, what's stopping them from finding a new job?

~~~
gonzo
Golden handcuffs.

~~~
harryh
That's not really the case here. Golden handcuffs refers to stock that was
previously granted but either has not yet vested or has vested but the
employee can't keep if they walk away from the job. While the employees in
question surely own Yik-yak stock that stock is now worthless.

They're starting at Square just like they would start at any other job. Thus
they will stay at Square if it is a better job for them (for whatever reason)
than they could otherwise get.

~~~
lazerwalker
Yes, but presumably as part of the acquisition they're getting $X00,000 of
stock/cash on a 4-year vest. That's far more than one would get for a standard
new hire options package at a company of Square's size/maturity.

I'd say that's accurate to describe as "golden handcuffs", since they
(probably) can't just walk down the street to another company and get that
offer matched.

~~~
harryh
I wouldn't call that "golden handcuffs." I would call it a better job offer.

~~~
lazerwalker
If golden handcuffs are "stock that was previously granted but either has not
yet vested or has vested but the employee can't keep if they walk away from
the job", I'm curious at what point unvested stock becomes "golden handcuffs".
The one-year cliff? One month in? After the first day, when waiting for your
one-year cliff is one day closer than your one-year cliff would be if you quit
and started a new job the very next day?

(Hope this isn't coming across as combative — if we're gonna have a discussion
of semantics, I'm trying to nail down where you're coming from :) )

~~~
harryh
As with many things in life I would say that it's shades of grey. Perhaps they
are handcuffs from day one but they haven't been latched closed yet. The
longer you stay the tighter they get.

The "tightness" of the handcuffs is, roughly speaking, the % of your
motivation to work there based on a previously accrued reward vs reward that
is earned day by day.

With powerful enough golden handcuffs the company could reduce your salary to
zero and you would still stay (though perhaps be pissed about it).

(not coming off as combative :) )

------
pklausler
I'm missing something. Were these engineers under a transferable contract?
What, specifically, did Square buy with their "less than $3 million", and from
whom?

~~~
jdavis703
What this likely means is that the engineers at Square get some kind of
vesting stock options (i.e. golden handcuffs) that are valued in aggregate at
less than $3 million. It also means the engineers get to have a well-
recognized brand on their resume, and not a gap of a few weeks to months that
then needs to be explained (not to mention the hit their bank accounts would
take). This is generally what's called an "acquihire."

------
Svexark
Yik Yak destroyed itself by ignoring their users and making changes that
undermined the reason people used their app in the first place. They're only
"struggling" because of a series of self-inflicted wounds.

~~~
huac
They faced legal trouble for the anonymity.

~~~
ng12
I don't think that's true, could you provide a source?

~~~
brightball
I don't know about legal challenges, but they basically created an anonymous
area broadcast. There's a lot of complications that come along with that.

~~~
ng12
I really don't think there are. As long as they complied with authorities when
somebody used Yik-Yak to do something illegal they're in the clear.

------
sortaThrowaway
>The site became a point of contention on campuses across the >country, with
many universities debating banning it.

Yes universities could "ban" an app

------
sebleon
Sad to see things end this way - Yik Yak was pretty dope at Berkeley. However,
I felt like the content got stale and predictable, and met the classic
homogenous fate of every upvote/downvote community ever.

------
EGreg
Square pays less than $3M for a whole team doing some declining startup and
refuses to comment. So Bloomberg makes a whole article about it?

------
fencepost
I played with it briefly, curious about whether it might on any way become
similar to the "local" view that was in Google+ for a while, but it seemed
mostly to consist of dig jokes and a little bit of high schoolers trashing
mostly students from other schools.

------
gonzo
The two co-founders attended Furman University and were fraternity brothers
who met in a coding clsss.

Square probably doesn't need more brogrammers.

~~~
sctb
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14187223](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14187223)
and marked it off-topic.

------
guelo
> The company’s reputation suffered from cases of cyber-harassment, hate
> speech, and threats that appeared on Yik Yak’s platform.

Angry young white men strike again. It's one thing to be threatened by
anonymous mobs on Twitter or Reddit but when you know the attackers are
phisically within a mile or two things can get seriously scary.

