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Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

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Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#81

Post by noodle »

frogstomp19 wrote: post #27
sdflkd wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

> 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.

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#82

Post by nso »

pjungwir wrote: post #78
s73ver wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my case it is: the store gives you a secret code, and you enter it on your phone to earn discounts and raffle entries. We would like to prevent people taking the code home and sharing it with all their friends. So it's not about tracking. Still I get why the restriction needs to be there.

Make them have to submit it via a WIFI network in the store?

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#83

Post by s73ver »

harryh wrote: post #46
ithinkinstereo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point being that a random guy hired off the street isn't getting those bonuses at all.

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#84

Post by harryh »

lazerwalker wrote: post #69
harryh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (fo…

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.

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

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#85

Post by coderholic »

pjungwir wrote: post #70
huehehue wrote: post #62

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…

Even if you could fingerprint the location accurately, how do you know I'm there now, vs. capturing all of the information when I was there and replaying them later?

A much easier problem than "are you really where you say you are?" is "are you likely to be sending me fake locations?", which is hard to do with a single location update, but if the user is moving rapidly, or in geographically distant locations across multiple updates it's much easier to catch.

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#86

Post by arprocter »

cgriswald wrote: post #74
MichaelGG wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 was a frequent user for quite a while. It was never truly anonymous in that Yikyak obviously maintained some type of internal ID to identify you. This was fine with me. We had some deep, real conversations (along with the usual nonsense). 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…

>I stopped using it when they added mandatory profiles

Same here. It seemed to me that they got rid of the one reason people were using the app in the first place. Also if this was to prevent abuse it actually made it easier to harass another user - 'oh it's that jerk qwerty123 again'

Another issue with being localized is if there aren't many users in the area. It was always busy in a city, but in a rural area there were very few posts - this could've been mitigated by scaling up the coverage zone

The -5 making things disappear wasn't the best solution, as the 'top rated' could become pretty generic stuff, whereas funny but controversial things could vanish quite quickly

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#87

Post by itake »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #77
pjungwir wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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.

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#88

Post by jameskegel »

posguy wrote: post #60
ynniv wrote: post #14

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.

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.

>Mercury

Vantiv Payments

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#89

Post by 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

Re: Square Said to Acquire Team from Struggling Social App Yik Yak

#90

Post by evan_ »

pjungwir wrote: post #70
huehehue wrote: post #62

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…

you could maybe just trust them but flag/disable accounts that jump between locations extremely quickly.

Might be tricky accounting for air travel but even then you could safely assume nobody's taking more than two flights a day and six a week or something like that

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