It's so weird how yikyak blew up then rapidly failed. I used it pretty heavily in undergrad and popularity didn't seem to wane during that school year when it got big. It just died over the summer since you were geolocked to your hometown, then it inexplicably never picked up again the next school year, just dead on arrival. Had they let people still use their collegiate yikak while off campus for the summer, yik yak might have been a juggernaut by today. I still don't think the niche has been captured: an anonymous, hyperlocal twitter/reddit hodgepodge, fueled solely by original and genuine campus memes and therefore immune to corporate ad peddling like global networks. Maybe that's why it failed.
Hey - I'm the author (I self-posted this, I hope that isn't against the posting etiquette here).<p>I wrote this post after a bit of a failed startup I tried making at the start of lockdown. It was called Ottr and it essentially aped YikYak exactly. I made a react web app, an API with web sockets (it had real time posting and comments) and even an iOS app.<p>I burnt out on it and gave up because it seems so hard to get that initial traction.<p>I've been trying to get the project posted publicly on GitHub for a while now but I wrote maybe 10k+ lines with literally zero tests because I was just trying to get it to market. The code isn't bad but i'd feel bad posting it without tests so that's what i'm working through now.
Very interesting, and good intro to Postgres R-trees! I kind of miss YikYak, it was pretty fun to see all the posts around UCLA. If it focused a bit more on promoting good content (and not just mindless noise, which eventually turns into edgy racist garbage), it might still be around.<p>(As a side note, I've always wanted to give MongoDB geospatial[1] queries a try. Wonder how they compare to Postgres' offering.)<p>[1] <a href="https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/geospatial-queries/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/geospatial-queries/</a>
Nice post! I love hacking around with PostGIS. While I'm not normally a huge ORM advocate I do like the GeoDjango API for this sort of thing [0].<p>There hasn't been enough experimentation with geospatial social applications. (There was a lot back in the early 2010s but it petered out.) I'm currently working on an experimental chat app that creates Slack-like channels associated with a topic and a location. I'm looking for collaborators on this project (primary need is for designers and community-builders, but also programmers) so if it appeals to you please get in touch (HN-facing email in profile).<p>[0] <a href="https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/ref/contrib/gis/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/ref/contrib/gis/</a>
Nice! I hadn't heard about R-Trees before. I guess you can potentially make do with a quadtree[1] but it seems R-Trees are better suited for geodetic data.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadtree" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadtree</a>
Interesting post! I also recreated YikYak as a side project and had to solve a lot of similar problems (It's called Clacku on the iOS and Android app stores if anyone cares). Managed to get a decent chunk of users to actually use it.