Yik Yak, once a promising new social app, was quietly put down last week. The few people who still used it bemoaned the loss. But the app committed metaphorical seppuku quite some time ago and has only just succumbed to the bleeding.
Yesterday I discovered #YikYak and today I learn that it's shutting down. Sorry, kids. By the time Mom shows up the party is over.
— Georgia Stitt (@georgiastitt) April 29, 2017
Yik Yak shot itself in the foot when it fundamentally altered the platform: It moved away from the anonymity which made its app so appealing to millennials in the first place.
First, it offered you the chance to have a more personalized handle. Then, last August, the handles became mandatory, meaning you were no longer completely anonymous. Yik Yak eventually reversed that change last November, but the damage was done. By last December, The Verge was reporting the company had laid off 60-percent of its workforce amid a huge downturn in usage.
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All Yik Yak assets were sold to Square for less than $3 million. Quite the comedown for the company that once demanded the princely price of $61 million in funding from venture capital firm Sequoia.
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