Yik Yak has laid off 60 percent of employees amid a downturn in the app’s growth prospects, The Verge has learned. The three-year-old anonymous social network has raised $73.5 million from top-tier investors on the promise that its young, college-age network of users could one day build a company to rival Facebook. But the challenge of growing its community while moving gradually away from anonymity has so far proven to be more than the company could muster. 
 
 Employees who were affected were informed of the layoffs Thursday morning, sources told The Verge. Yik Yak employed about 50 people, and now only about 20 remain, the company said. The community, marketing, design, and product teams were all deeply affected, one source said. 
 
 “We recently made some strategic changes at Yik Yak in line with our key areas of focus for the company,” CEO Tyler Droll told The Verge in an email. “Unfortunately, as part of that we had to make the difficult decision to lay off a portion of the team. We are incredibly appreciative of their contributions toward making Yik Yak the special place for college students around the world that it is today." 
 
 Atlanta-based Yik Yak was founded in 2014 by Furman University students Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington. The app updated the concept of dorm newsletters for the mobile era, letting anyone post comments about school, their campus, or life in general. The fact that comments were anonymous initially helped the app grow, as it encouraged more candid forms of sharing than students might otherwise post on Facebook or Instagram. 
 
 Anonymity initially seemed like a plus 
 
 A year after it launched, Yik Yak had cracked the top 10 most downloaded apps, and it eventually spread to thousands of college campuses around the world. By November 2014, investors had valued the company at $400 million. 
 
 But growth stalled almost immediately after Sequoia’s investment. As with Secret before it, the app’s anonymous nature created a series of increasingly difficult problems for the business. Almost from the start, Yik Yak users reported incidents of bullying and harassment. Multiple schools were placed on lockdown after the app was used to make threats. Some schools even banned it. Yik Yak put tools in place designed to reduce harassment, but growth began to slow soon afterward. 
 
 Users revolted at the pivot away from anonymity 
 
 In March, Yik Yak began letting users add optional handles to their post. In August, the company started requiring users to add handles. The handles did not have to correspond to the users’ real identities, but users revolted anyway. The App Store was littered with 1-star reviews, and the app did not see its usual bump in downloads when college students came back to school in September. Yik Yak is not currently among the 1,500 most-downloaded apps in the App Store, according to market research firm App Annie. 
 
 Yik Yak quietly reversed itself in November, allowing users to once again post to the app without using handles. But the move appears to have done little to attract new users. 
 
 The company still has millions of dollars left in the bank, giving it more time to figure out a new path forward. Yik Yak says the existing app will continue in development. But given the current trends, it seems likely that the remaining team members will need to try a new approach. 
 
 If you have more information about today’s layoffs, please email casey@theverge.com or DM @CaseyNewton on Twitter. 
 
 Update, 4:09 p.m.: This story has been updated to include new information about the number of employees affected. An earlier version of this story said that 70 percent of employees had been laid off, but Yik Yak later revised the figure to 60 percent. ||||| Yik Yak, the once universally recognized anonymous social network that virally took over college campuses back in 2014, is planning to lay off a “significant” number of employees, first noted by The Verge. The company is said to be retaining mostly engineers as it notified its team of about 50 employees earlier this morning. 
 
 In a statement to TechCrunch, Tyler Droll, CEO of Yik Yak, pointed to strategic changes as the cause for the layoffs. While it’s possible that some positions are being shifted around to refocus the company on “local” social networking, declining download metrics tell the story of a company struggling to find its identity and retain user interest. 
 
 Yik Yak was founded as I started college in 2013. I had front row seats to the app’s rise and fall on one of the largest campuses in America. 
 
 There was a point in late 2014 when employees and ambassadors were setting up booths around Ann Arbor to give out Yik Yak socks and beer cozies. This was clearly the high point for the app and students ate it up. Unfortunately, the company has since struggled to gain prominence outside the aforementioned demographics. 
 
 The startup presented itself with an overall “scandalous spring-break” vibe, which proved inaccessible to many users. A group of Yik Yak promoters once marched around UofM with a camera to film students responding to blunt, shock-value, questions. 
 
 While Yik Yak gets a lot of criticism for being host to offensive anonymous content, it has shown me, on more than one occasion, that anonymity can sometimes have value. 
 
 Students struggling with overwhelming anxiety, depression and traumatic life events have found solace on the platform. In a single night, Yik Yak’s feed could simultaneously include threats to athletes coming off a bad game and notes of kindness and understanding to other struggling peers. 
 
 The company never found a way to increase the compassion and put and end to the hate. Efforts to rebrand as more of a “local” social network brought out frustration in users who appreciated the app as purely a place to anonymously vent within a shared community. This, coupled with the success of other emerging networks like Snapchat and Instagram, have almost put the app in its grave. 
 
 Yik Yak’s current condition is weak. Data pulled from the company’s site via Wayback Machine, indicates that Yik Yak had 23 open positions listed on their careers page this time last year. Today, rather than being higher, the company only has 7 open positions — two of which are for contractors. 
 
 Ranking statistics pulled from App Annie don’t paint a much brighter picture. Though Yik Yak has shown signs of life at various points throughout its cycles of updates, trusting in the trend, the app has been unable to gain any meaningful traction — particularly in the last few months. 
 
 Download statistics only seem to make the problem look worse. According to data collected by Sensor Tower, Yik Yak received fewer than 100k downloads last month. That’s worldwide data across both the iOS and Android ecosystems. This time last year that number was over 300k — representing a decline of 76 percent. 
 
 It’s growing increasingly likely that Yik Yak will fall into complete obscurity, just like the messages of users who anonymously posted on it. That said, I’d still bet a hefty sum that Yik Yak’s failure will create a void that can only be filled by the next niche, risqué, social media platform. 
 
 We’ve reached out to leadership at Yik Yak and will update this post when we hear back. ||||| On Tuesday evening, students at the embattled University of Missouri noticed several disturbing messages on the anonymous messaging app Yik Yak. 
 
 “I’m going to stand my ground tomorrow and shoot every black person I see,” read one. 
 
 “Some of you are alright. Don’t go to campus tomorrow,” said the second, echoing a warning posted to 4chan the day before the Umpqua Community College shooting last month. 
 
 
 
 A redacted screenshot of a tweet that compiled the MU threats. (Twitter) 
 
 University of Missouri police have said they apprehended Hunter M. Park, the 19-year-old suspected of posting both threats, and have reassured students that there’s no cause for further concern. (The school in Columbia, Mo., is operating normally, and classes have not been canceled.) Even if the threats were empty, however, they’re sure to inflame concerns over the ever-controversial Yik Yak, which only three weeks ago was panned by a coalition of 70 women’s and civil rights groups as a font of discrimination, harassment and abuse. 
 
 [How do you solve a problem like Yik Yak?] 
 
 Yik Yak is essentially a public, anonymous, location-based message board: After downloading the app, you can post anything you want to nearby readers — who can then comment, up-vote or down-vote your “yak,” also anonymously. 
 
 Since it was founded by two recent college grads in 2013, the app has proven particularly popular among students, who often use it to trade the sorts of jokes and campus gossip that — in this ultra-Googleable age — they wouldn’t want to post under their real names. But it’s also posed major, repeat problems, at universities especially, when students abuse the app’s promise of anonymity. 
 
 “This sort of misbehavior is NOT what Yik Yak is to be used for. Period,” co-founder Brooks Buffington wrote in a statement about the Missouri threats. “It is not condoned by Yik Yak, and it violates our terms of service.” 
 
 [Race relations and Yik Yak] 
 
 Below are the SparkNotes on what may be the country’s most controversial social media app — and a few suggested ways for fixing it. 
 
 What is Yik Yak? 
 
 Yik Yak is an anonymous, location-based bulletin board that — per the analytics firm App Annie — has ranked among the top 30 social media apps in the United States almost constantly since 2014. The company has raised more than $73 million in funding, most of it from Silicon Valley powerhouse Sequoia Capital. It’s valued at between $200 million and $300 million. 
 
 While the app is popular among college students, it’s gotten lackluster reviews elsewhere. Common Sense Media, the children’s advocacy group, gives it a one star rating out of five — apparently because a zero-star option is not available. “Yik Yak’s just yucky,” the organization wrote. “It’s a gossipy, lewd, crass online environment in which anything goes.” 
 
 Why would anyone want to use something like that? 
 
 To be fair, Yik Yak is not all — or even mostly — bad. For the most part, students use it as a cross between Post Secret and a bar-bathroom wall: a place to post jokes, observations about college life or current events, and questions for other students. Slate’s Amanda Hess has argued, convincingly, that the app actually helps empower people who might otherwise be marginalized or ignored: certainly, there are plenty of instances in which students have used Yik Yak to spread positive messages or to draw attention to important causes. 
 
 On balance, however, Yik Yak is neither super-positive nor horrifically destructive — in fact, it’s pretty mundane. Imagine an endless scroll of gems like “party at TKE tonight” or “gonna fail my econ midterm today.” 
 
 Has Yik Yak had problems with threats or harassment in the past? 
 
 It has! So many problems, in fact, that on Oct. 21, a coalition of civil rights groups descended on Washington, D.C., to urge the Department of Education to issue guidelines against it. (The DoE has said it “looks forward to responding,” though it hasn’t yet.) At this rate, the app is fielding a new high-profile incident roughly every two weeks. A sampling: 
 
 The list goes on, needless to say, but these are some of the events to make the news. Victims allege that a range of cyberbullying and malicious gossip goes down outside the spotlight, too. 
 
 If Yik Yak is anonymous, how have police identified the people posting threatening yaks? 
 
 Because nothing is truly anonymous these days! (News flash.) Per Yik Yak’s guidelines for law enforcement, the app logs your IP address, GPS coordinates and “user-agent string” — the technical details of your specific device — every time you post a message. Yik Yak also asks for your phone number the first time you post, which it keeps filed away in a database. Law enforcement can file a subpoena, court order, search warrant or emergency request for any of this information, which Yik Yak complies with on a “case-by-case” basis. 
 
 Once police have your phone number and device details, it’s a simple matter of cross-referencing those with your cell phone provider to get your name and other information. 
 
 Has Yik Yak done anything to combat threats or harassment? 
 
 A message that displays to all users when they download Yik Yak. 
 
 Well, yes — but not as much as critics would hope. When the app launched in 2013, it was available to college and high school students. Yik Yak has since marked the app 17+ in the Apple and Google Play stores, a feature that allows parents to block younger kids from downloading it. They also partnered with a company called Maponics to draw “geofences” around elementary, middle and high schools, effectively making the app unavailable within a given distance from that location. 
 
 Since early 2015, Yik Yak has also displayed a warning when users attempt to post phone numbers or messages with certain keywords, such as “bomb”: “Pump the brakes,” it reads, in part, “this yak may contain threatening language.” 
 
 Still, many people have argued this isn’t enough and that Yik Yak needs to do more to protect users from abuse. While the app warns users not to “bully” other users or to “post other people’s phone numbers, street addresses … or other personally identifiable information,” the abuse filter does not screen for full names or addresses, which makes it a convenient tool for doxing. Yik Yak also provides a way for users to “flag” abusive yaks, but the company is far from transparent about how long it takes moderators to get to flagged messages. 
 
 What could Yik Yak do? 
 
 Aside from screening for the aforementioned names and addresses, the app could try a few things. A study published in the Journal of School Violence last year suggested using a program like Radian6 (which culls and analyzes social media posts in real time) to detect and monitor cyberbullying proactively. This could presumably be done on the part of Yik Yak’s moderators or by a third party. 
 
 Critics have also called on the app to hire more moderators, enforce stricter policies against abuse and introduce resources for people who have been harassed on Yik Yak. 
 
 In January, an 18-year-old woman named Elizabeth Long — who petitioned for the app to be shut down after she was brutally cyberbullied on it — praised Yik Yak for making many of these changes. In late October, however, Long posted an angry update: “They assured me that various new policies would go into effect that would protect kids from bullying and harassment on Yik Yak,” she wrote. “Nearly a year later, those promises have not held up.” 
 
 Can universities stop the app? 
 
 There’s very little that universities can do. At least a dozen have symbolically “banned” the app, or blocked access to it on their Wi-fi networks. That’s controversial, though, and pretty pointless: Students can still access the site via their phone’s data service. 
 
 The student government at the tiny College of Idaho asked Yik Yak to place a geofence around campus, the same method they use to block the app at high schools. (Yik Yak declined.) Others student groups have tried to get their peers to voluntarily give up the app: at Creighton University, the student union went so far as to hand out buttons that said “Above the Yak.” 
 
 What’s the next step for anti-Yik Yak advocates? 
 
 On Wednesday, the civil-rights coalition that first appealed to the DoE announced that they had a new tactic: going to Yik Yak’s investors, directly. In a statement emailed to the Post, the organization said they planned to release a letter to Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson Venture on Thursday, asking them to urge Yik Yak to strengthen its policies against “hateful targeting and harassment of students on college campuses.” Several individuals have also used sites like Change.org and Care2 to start online petitions. 
 
 For better or worse, however, the most immediate way to stop harassment on Yik Yak may come from users themselves. A survey of students at the University of Texas, whose results were published in the book “New Media, New Ethics?”, found that users were far less likely to defend someone against bullying on Yik Yak than on Facebook. If students did stand up for each other, however, the norms on the app could change. 
 
 Until then, Yik Yak remains a pretty dicey place. 
 
 1 of 26 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Former civil rights lawyer named interim president at University of Missouri following student protests View Photos Michael Middleton takes over for Tim Wolfe, who abruptly resigned amid student-led protests over his administration’s handling of racial complaints. Caption Michael Middleton takes over for Tim Wolfe, who abruptly resigned amid student-led protests over his administration’s handling of racial complaints. Nov. 12, 2015 Michael Middleton speaks at a news conference in Columbia after the University of Missouri Board of Curators named him interim president of the university system. Daniel Brenner/Columbia Daily Tribune via AP Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
 
 [This post has been updated multiple times since it was published.] 
 
 Liked that? Try these:
– Yik Yak collapse. The Verge reports the once-popular college social-networking app that had visions of rivaling Facebook laid off 60% of its employees Thursday. The layoffs affected 30 employees largely from Yik Yak's community, marketing, design, and product teams. "I didn't know that it was going to come to this," one laid-off employee tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "I don't know what the future of Yik Yak is, but I can't see that it continues." That future was a lot brighter back in 2013, when Yik Yak launched and quickly became one of the 10 most popular apps, spreading to thousands of college campuses and getting valued at $400 million. Yik Yak's big innovation—anonymous posting—was also its downfall. "In a single night, Yik Yak’s feed could simultaneously include threats to athletes coming off a bad game and notes of kindness and understanding to other struggling peers," TechCrunch states. But reports of abuse and bullying spread; people used Yik Yak to make threats, resulting in school lockdowns; and some campuses banned the app. By August, Yik Yak was requiring users to post under names, even fake ones. It was a wildly unpopular move, and Yik Yak currently doesn't crack the top 1,500 apps. Its downloads have dropped 76% in the past year. Of the layoffs, CEO Tyler Droll said: “We recently made some strategic changes at Yik Yak in line with our key areas of focus for the company."