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Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

forbes.com

51–60 of 262 posts

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#51
post #19

This is just Forbes blogspam of the original blog post: https://medium.com/@tedlivingston/moving-forward-boldly-with... It was submitted to HN here, and I noted that it would be unlikely to get attention because of its title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21055034 HN's strict title rules encourage submitting blogspam that writes sensationalized titles like this (and it's even been dialed back now).

[deleted]

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#54
post #50

One and a half year ago, I built an (unofficial) bot, Ragebot [0], that would function as spam protection for the many bot accounts joining public Kik groups. The project took off and was added to hundreds of thousands of groups by Kik users. Two days ago, Ted Livingston announced the closure and Kik has been chaos throughout ever since, with people adopting Discord and Telegram to retain their online friend circles.…

I'm confused. Not a Kik user, but how are public groups a unique feature (compared to say Subreddits)?

OP meant searchable public group. In discord you need an invite link, and there's no way to search by its name.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#56

Sorry but it’s hard for me to believe an app with so many users is just going to close down for a reason that’s largely tangential to the strength of its core business. It’s much more likely this is a ploy to get the SEC or other litigating parties to settle for a smaller amount.

But do those users actually make the app any money? If not, there may not be a lot of real value there? Or at least, not enough to interest the kind of buyers capable of taking on the technical and social maintenance required.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#57
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least they brought attention to how bad it was to rely on NPM. If anyone doesn't remember, this is how the whole left-pad issue started: https://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-np...

Off-topic, but pretty crazy that the timestamp of that blog post doesn't appear until the end, so you can be reading an article from 2016 and not immediately know that this was a few years ago.

All of tumblr works like that.

Not defending, just contextualizing, and clarifying that NPM didn't make that specific design choice. Obviously, they chose to use tumblr, though.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#58
post #9

... but will it take out a bunch of NPM packages with it?

At least they brought attention to how bad it was to rely on NPM. If anyone doesn't remember, this is how the whole left-pad issue started: https://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-np...

and don't forget, left pad as a service:

http://left-pad.io/

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#59
post #11

What was the $1B valuation based on? It seems absurd.

Whatsapp. Slack. Any chat app with sufficient user base seems to end up with multi-billion valuation.

This almost fees like the valuation was based upon the probability Facebook might buy them?

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#60

The weird thing about Kik was that everyone I met that used it thought it had some sort automatic message deletion like Telegram, but I don't think it did. Old messages would stay forever.

Messages were stored to the device. If you installed and logged into Kik on another device, the chat history would clear.
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