Recreating YikYak with Postgres

[asdff]

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.

[beckler]

I interviewed at YikYak shortly before they released the feature that killed them. I actually got to talk to the CEO at some point. They discussed adding something personally identifying to fight bulling, which was a huge problem with YY at the time. I also asked how they planned to monetize, but honestly the response I got didn't seem very fleshed out or just not thought through very well.

Sucks because they actually had some very impressive engineering going on at the time, and I really wanted to absorb some knowledge from those guys, but unfortunately it didn't work out. YikYak shutdown less than a year after my interview.

[AJRF]

Yep - YikYak did let you do this after a while, but if you check the subreddit for YikYak they rolled this change out along with a feature that meant you had to give or an email or phone number IIRC. Huge backlash and people stopped using it.

I tried to solve this in Ottr but letting a "Explore". They could open a map, drop a pin and that would be their new location. If they posted while "Exploring" their post would be marked as such.

[newen]

For a while and probably until it died, they actually did allow you to use your college yikyak when you were away. I think you could use two locations, your current location and your "home" location. It died overnight because they forced everyone to have usernames one day. Probably because they wanted to monetize.

[implying]

There was a lot of social/cultural issues with YikYak. My college explicitly forbid using it, and a lot of other small colleges had similar policies, largely because of abusive posts happening on the platform.

[ponker]

Anything anonymous is destined to implode from toxicity unless it's very actively moderated.

[AJRF]

Hey - I'm the author (I self-posted this, I hope that isn't against the posting etiquette here).

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.

I burnt out on it and gave up because it seems so hard to get that initial traction.

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.

[thedirt0115]

Don't be afraid to put unfinished code or code without tests up on GitHub -- just mention in your README that it's not production-ready yet or something. It still has educational value for the community. Maybe someone will even help you write tests! Btw, thanks for sharing -- I had never heard of the R-Tree data structure before.

[newen]

Don't know if they're still up but I remember there were a bunch of yikyak clones around the time it stopped being popular. Just weren't enough people in any of them, so I stopped them. Network effects and all.

[compsciphd]

yikyak failed even with significant funding, why would you ape it exactly?

[dvt]

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.

(As a side note, I've always wanted to give MongoDB geospatial[1] queries a try. Wonder how they compare to Postgres' offering.)

[1] https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/geospatial-queries/

[realbarack]

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].

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).

[0] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/ref/contrib/gis/

[dmlittle]

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadtree

[sennacy]

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.