71–80 of 144 posts
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Honestly, I'm continually amazed by the level of absolute garbage people can ship with any level of popularity. And worse, get funding to ship it.
But it doesn't really matter does it? It's a social application, not a banking system. If your garbage gets users it's not garbage.
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But it doesn't really matter does it? It's a social application, not a banking system. If your garbage gets users it's not garbage.
If a company gets users but fails to retain them, causing the product to fail and the investors to lose their funds, then it certainly isn't a success.
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But it doesn't really matter does it? It's a social application, not a banking system. If your garbage gets users it's not garbage.
No, that just means it's popular garbage.
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The issue was their entire app. The exact same reason bullying could happen was the exact reason people loved it (anonymity). Group A (parents, schools, etc) wanted complete de-masking + real-world identity while Group B (the users) wanted some anonymity with no real-world identity. Yik-Yak could've never won as far as I can see.
Could be anonymous but still keep the unique phone ID and boot/hide disruptive users. Users probably want anonymity at a far weaker guarantee than, say, Tor offers.
I stopped using it when they added mandatory profiles. For online discussion, there is a huge difference between anonymous and pseudonymous. While anonymous, no persona is formed in the mind of other users, except within the context of a specific discussion. It is impossible to form factions. Group think is somewhat minimized, because no one knows it is you that is not following the party line on issue A, even though you are totally on board for issue B.
When you are pseudonymous, factions form, grudges form, prejudices form. Suddenly someone remembers your position on gun control and assumes your position on the death penalty. If you say something stupid, it stays with you.
I don't want to share my sexual interests and my political point of views with strangers and have those things be linked to the same account (from the user perspective). I DO want to do that without that link. I think it tends to focus more on the issues, and let's people avoid the artificial barriers that otherwise might come between them.
When they made this switch, it was suddenly an entirely different app. It was no different than just finding a random web forum, except that you could be sure the people around you were geographically close to you (sort of). Completely non-anonymous Next Door is better in that regard anyway, and Yikyak no longer had anything to offer me.
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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 sp…
Mailchimp?
Off topic - I always get such bizarre vibes when I interact with anyone from MC or hear of others' interactions with MC employees (ATL here).
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 There was n…
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…
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 There was n…
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…
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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…
I think the reason that API is private is because people do not want that level of tracking. And there are very few applications which absolutely, positively need this level of accuracy. And, I'm sorry, but marketing/advertising doesn't count.
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They prob have various retention bonuses in place (either cash, square options, or both) to keep the acquired engineers at Square for x months/years.
Sure, but again, the clocks on those are starting at zero just like you might get at any new job.
They definitely could shop around and find a new role (if they can find another company they want to work for in Atlanta) but it's unlikely to come with as healthy compensation as that.
Plus if you like your team you can keep working together.
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> only unicorn Kabbage Uhhh Let me introduce you to a little company called Internet Security Systems. $1.3B+ acquisition by IBM.
I could be wrong here but my understanding is if a company is acquired they WERE a unicorn (if the acquisition was for $1B+) but they aren't a unicorn after the acquisition.