The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak
nytimes.com
The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak
1–10 of 145 posts
Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak
#2Surprised it hasn't been replaced by someone outside the US who wouldn't be pressured to make it a safe space. Not discounting the potential issues...just surprised it hasn't happened.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak
#3Surprised it hasn't been replaced by someone outside the US who wouldn't be pressured to make it a safe space. Not discounting the potential issues...just surprised it hasn't happened.
Probably, there just isn't the demand. Snapchat snapped up most of the market (not anonymous but similar)
Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak
#4Surprised it hasn't been replaced by someone outside the US who wouldn't be pressured to make it a safe space. Not discounting the potential issues...just surprised it hasn't happened.
The question is, could anyone else raise enough money to get something like this started again after what Yik Yak became? VC funds likely won't want to touch something like Yik Yak for a while. At the very least a platform that so visibly enables anonymous coordination of harassment is unlikely to attract the advertisers or sponsors they would need to become profitable.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak
#5Surprised it hasn't been replaced by someone outside the US who wouldn't be pressured to make it a safe space. Not discounting the potential issues...just surprised it hasn't happened.
Probably, there just isn't the demand. Snapchat snapped up most of the market (not anonymous but similar)
The decline in interest happened after they got rid of anonymity.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak
#6What ruined Yik Yak for me was making the geographical areas larger so my University's 'herd' included surrounding cities too. Too much noise. This compounded with the removal of anonymity led to me deleting the application.
Wonder if it is possible to run an app like this at cost somehow.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak
#7Surprised it hasn't been replaced by someone outside the US who wouldn't be pressured to make it a safe space. Not discounting the potential issues...just surprised it hasn't happened.
The question is, could anyone else raise enough money to get something like this started again after what Yik Yak became? VC funds likely won't want to touch something like Yik Yak for a while. At the very least a platform that so visibly enables anonymous coordination of harassment is unlikely to attract the advertisers or sponsors they would need to become profitable.
Is it possible to make an open source peer to peer version? Seems like something along the lines of ipfs or dat would be a good substrate.
Is it open source feasible in walled gardens like apple or google app stores? With respect to dev costs, permissions, tooling?
Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak
#8[deleted]
Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak
#9Surprised it hasn't been replaced by someone outside the US who wouldn't be pressured to make it a safe space. Not discounting the potential issues...just surprised it hasn't happened.
Not surprising, no one has figured out how to monetize it properly.
Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak
#10The article makes the case (to me) that local + anonymous was a failed experiment. In real-life communities, local means not anonymous, and bad behavior -- which is rare whether anonymous or not -- can be tied to an individual right away.
The problem is that nasty, anonymous, and local is a terrible combination:
> That hyper-localization is also what made the cases of harassment particularly galling. Ms. Musick, one of the plaintiffs, said, “With Yik Yak, in the back of your mind, you know they’re not from around the world or other parts of the state, they’re right there in your classroom, in your dining hall. On a campus with 4,500 students, that’s a pretty small group of people. This isn’t some creepy guy in his mom’s basement in Indiana.”
In contrast, nasty, anonymous, and non-local is much easier to dismiss.
The plaintiffs tried to solve it other ways, but they couldn't. All the local authorities referred them back to Yik-Yak -- the university staff, local police -- and Yik-Yak usually did nothing and at best would hide posts.
To be clear, most of Yik-Yak was non-harassing. Useful? I don't know. Apparently not useful enough.