I'm still a little confused about what happened to Yik Yak. I would love to have an app like that right now especially during quarantine, but it seems like they had a bullying issue. Do you think this would still be a problem today/any way around this?
It died off really sharply when they started enforcing "username" instead of "anonymous" - previously posts just got a random icon/avatar next to the message.<p>FWIW, it was never pseudonymous or anonymous. You could retrieve persistent identifiers for everyone, including phone numbers, GPS, etc. if you sniffed the request. They logged everything, verified non-VoIP numbers, and all.
Personal experience: I remember when this happened, their offices were in the same atrium as ours in Atlanta. Many people leaving with boxes, lots of tears, and a lot of anger. We use to watch their team building meetings outside, and I think they all really believed in what they were building.
Life is weird. Pets.com sounded like the dumbest idea in 1999, but I get my pet stuff auto delivered from Chewy and Amazon every month.<p>Reboot it if you have conviction, times have changed, and will change. I still have ideas that absolutely no one believes in and hasn’t been solved for over a decade now. Who the fuck knows? Reboot Yik Yak.