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The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

nytimes.com

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Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#11

Post by Alex3917 »

mokash wrote: post #6

What 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.

> Wonder if it is possible to run an app like this at cost somehow.

Given that it's just an API serving short text snippets, the hosting costs shouldn't be more than a few cents per user per year. Let's say you're serving one university with 50,000 students, and your hosting costs are $3,000 per year... Just send out an update email once a quarter with a few ads at the end and you've more than covered your expenses.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#13

Post by oevi »

tyingq wrote: post #2

Surprised it hasn't been replaced by someone outside the US who wouldn't be pressured to make it a safe space.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.

There is Jodel [0] which is quite popular among students in Germany. It has strict guidelines [1] which try exactly this.

[0] https://jodel-app.com/

[1] https://jodel-app.com/guidelines.html

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#15

Post by diggan »

daveguy wrote: post #7
skywhopper wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've dabled a bit with creating something similar (but without the radius limitation), my current experiment runs over at https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmdsQExVDxp2EgERDZFn2Q7Q6Ldi3uH4XSpQTu4... but it's still missing being able to scale + easily be able to host supporting nodes for making the content stay around longer than the browser sessions. The repository is here: https://github.com/victorbjelkholm/tree-talk

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#16

Post by qmarchi »

Honestly, I don't get all the complaining from harassment.

We live in a digital age where we can control a large amount of our information stream. If we don't like something, we just turn off the stream. It's like left-wing advocates and Fox. They don't like it, so they don't watch it.

If you don't like what people are posting on some service, remove the service, inform people you know that you don't care about what's posted.

Go on living, stop being a hyper-sensitive prick about people saying mean things. They're going to say them whether or not it's on Yik-Yak, 4chan, or Facebook.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm missing something. Let me know. I love being wrong, it lets me learn new things.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#17

Post by StevePerkins »

theparanoid wrote: post #3
tyingq wrote: post #2

Surprised 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)

I'm an alumni of Usenet and IRC from back in the early-90's. I can assure you that there's always been (and probably always will be) demand for anonymous forums, into which trolls can project sexual frustration and feelings of powerlessness.

I was a bit too old to know about Yik Yak during its heyday, but I can only imagine the troll-appeal of anonymity PLUS being able to target local real-world individuals by name. Old school trolling was limited to targets who were non-local, and by and large anonymous themselves.

So I have no doubt about the market demand from trolls. I just don't understand why there was ever any demand from ANYONE ELSE. And I certainly don't see a path to monetization.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#18

Post by reilly3000 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #11
mokash wrote: post #6

What 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.

> Wonder if it is possible to run an app like this at cost somehow. Given that it's just an API serving short text snippets, the hosting costs shouldn't be more than a few cents per user per year. Let's say you're serving one university with 50,000 students, and your hosting costs are $3,000 per year... Just send out an update email once a quarter with a few ads at the end and you've more than covered your expenses.

In order to do a quarterly email that pays your the service you would have to achieve a minimum page CPM of $15 which at the industry average rate of $1.50 would need 10 ads sold and trafficked per email. Not impossible, but a lot of effort to source and manage that revenue and/or more frequent emails, larger rates (more sales effort) or ...?

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#19

Post by nothis »

qmarchi wrote: post #16

Honestly, I don't get all the complaining from harassment. We live in a digital age where we can control a large amount of our information stream. If we don't like something, we just turn off the stream. It's like left-wing advocates and Fox. They don't like it, so they don't watch it. If you don't like what people are posting on some service, remove the service, inform people you know that you don't care about what'…

The article is pretty specific. First of all, it talks about school kids who you can't really tell to "be rational about it". Secondly, if you turn off your phone but people still organize multimedia mass-harassment behind your back, "turning off your phone" doesn't change shit.

Re: The Rise and Fall of Yik Yak

#20

Post by _m8fo »

qmarchi wrote: post #16

Honestly, I don't get all the complaining from harassment. We live in a digital age where we can control a large amount of our information stream. If we don't like something, we just turn off the stream. It's like left-wing advocates and Fox. They don't like it, so they don't watch it. If you don't like what people are posting on some service, remove the service, inform people you know that you don't care about what'…

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