Popular messaging app Yik Yak is shutting down, the company announced. Once famous back in 2014, the messaging app gradually started losing its shine with people no longer interested in the tool.
The company stated the tool will begin winding down over this coming week, as they start "tinkering around with what's ahead" for their brand, technology and themselves, said Yik Yak co-founders Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington in a blog post.
Some of the company's engineers will be moving over to Square, Jack Dorsey's payments company. Square paid $1 million to get employees to switch to Square. Square didn't want the app, however.
"We’re grateful to the users who made Yik Yak a place for laughs, camaraderie, stress relief, social comfort, news, memes, class recommendations, campus spirit, and so much more. We've loved being part of your college experience over the past four school years," the blog post reads.
The founders of Yik Yak acknowledge that building the app and the company that powered the app has been the "greatest, hardest, most enjoyable, most stressful, and ultimately most rewarding experience" they've had. Droll and Buffington also thank the team that worked on making the app special, as well as investors and mentors.
In the same post, they confessed that sometimes they got it right with things they implemented, like the yakarma, or the Yik Yak socks, campus tours and so on, but they also mention the times they missed the mark like when they removed the toggle button on handles.
It was by this time the user base had dwindled quite a bit, especially after the platform became plagued by cyber bullying with few ways to combat it.
Therefore, for users using Yik Yak, they may want to start looking for an alternative if haven't found one yet.
