Yik Yak was the anonymous, location-based message board that swept American college campuses, collapsed under the weight of what anonymity invites, and then — unusually for this catalog — came back from the dead. Founded in late 2013 by two Furman University graduates, Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington, it shut down on May 5, 2017, with the assets passing to the payments company Square for about $1 million. That was supposed to be the end. But in February 2021 new owners bought the brand, and in August 2021 they relaunched it, which is why Yik Yak’s fate cell reads not “Shut Down” but the rare green word: Revived.
The original arc was a textbook venture rocket and a textbook moderation catastrophe. Yik Yak let anyone post anonymously to a feed of everyone else within a roughly 5-mile radius — a “herd” — which on a college campus meant a single shared, identity-free bulletin board. It spread explosively: within a year of launch it ranked among the top ten most-downloaded social apps in the United States, and it raised roughly $73 million from venture investors, including a Sequoia-led round that reportedly valued it near $400 million in 2014. For a brief moment two recent graduates ran one of the hottest apps in the country.
Then the same anonymity that fueled the growth fueled the harm. Untethered from identity and tied to a specific place, Yik Yak became a vector for bullying, racist and antisemitic abuse, and — most seriously — bomb threats and threats of violence aimed at named individuals and at the campuses themselves. Schools demanded bans; Yik Yak geo-fenced middle and high schools and, belatedly, tried to add handles and identities. The fixes alienated the users who had come precisely for anonymity without satisfying the critics, and growth reversed: downloads fell 76 percent in 2016. After laying off most of its staff that December, the company gave up.
Little users’ data was lost in any catastrophic sense — anonymity meant there was little to lose — but a genuine community of students lost their square, and the founders lost a company that had been worth a reported $400 million. The 2021 revival, under new owners promising “community guardrails” against the very behavior that killed the original, is the green note: proof that a network can be brought back, and an open question as to whether anonymity’s appeal can be separated from its harm. Yik Yak was later acquired again, by the rival app Sidechat, in 2023.
App.net was the ad-free, subscription-funded “Twitter alternative” that asked a genuinely good question — what if the users were the customers instead of the product? — and then could not find enough of them to keep the lights on. Founded by Dalton Caldwell and Bryan Berg under Mixed Media Labs, it launched on August 8, 2012 on a single, principled premise: members would pay a fee, so the service would answer to them rather than to advertisers, and the perverse incentives that warped ad-funded social networks would simply never apply. It was a real-time microblogging platform with a developer-friendly API at its core, and for a stretch it was the most idealistic thing on the social web.
The founding act was a crowdfunding campaign that became a referendum on whether people would pay for a better social network. Caldwell set a $500,000 goal and a hard deadline, and the campaign cleared it, ultimately raising roughly $803,000 from over 11,000 backers. Paid plans ran $50 a year or $5 a month, and a developer tier targeted the builders Caldwell believed would make the platform indispensable. In May 2013 App.net reported it had passed 100,000 users. The early excitement was real, and so was the affection of the small, technical community that gathered there.
The arithmetic, however, never closed. The thesis depended on a flywheel — paying members would attract third-party developers, whose apps would attract more paying members — and the flywheel never reached escape velocity. Renewals lagged, growth stalled, and on May 6, 2014 the founders conceded that subscription income could no longer fund full-time staff; App.net went into maintenance mode, kept running on autopilot from the revenue it still had. On January 12, 2017 Caldwell and Berg announced the service would close, and on March 14, 2017 it shut down for good, with the platform code open-sourced and user data deleted thereafter.
What App.net lost was not scale — it never had much — but a genuinely better idea, run by people who believed it. Its failure did not disprove the thesis that users should be the customer; it proved how hard that thesis is to fund when the incumbent is free and already has everyone’s friends.
SixDegrees.com was the first thing that looked like a social network, and it died before the world was ready for one. Launched in 1997 by the New York entrepreneur Andrew Weinreich and his company MacroView, it let users create a profile, list their friends, family, and acquaintances, and then traverse those connections outward — sending messages and seeing how they were linked to anyone else on the site, first degree to second to third. The name came from the “six degrees of separation” idea, and the concept was, in retrospect, exactly right: the profile, the friend list, the friends-of-friends graph. Every social network since has been a remix of what SixDegrees did first.
The numbers, for 1997, were genuinely large. At its peak the site had around 3.5 million fully registered members and close to 100 employees, and in December 1999 it was sold to YouthStream Media Networks for a reported $125 million — a headline price that, arriving near the top of the dot-com mania, made Weinreich a textbook example of selling at exactly the right moment. The patent he and his co-inventors filed on the underlying method, US Patent 6,175,831, would later be regarded as the foundational social-networking patent and was eventually bought up by companies including LinkedIn.
What SixDegrees could not buy was time. The technology and habits that make social networks work — broadband always-on connections, digital cameras and photos worth sharing, a critical mass of friends already online — did not yet exist in the late 1990s, so users built their networks and then found little to do in them. When the dot-com bubble burst, YouthStream’s finances collapsed under it, and the site that had invented the category was wound down around 2000–2001, catalogued as shut by 2001. It was not outcompeted; nothing yet existed to compete with it. It was, in its founder’s own diagnosis, simply too early — the right idea waiting roughly five years for the rest of the internet to arrive.