These Failed Apps Discovered a Hidden Rule of the Web

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: March 15, 2017 at 8:07:44 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] These Failed Apps Discovered a Hidden Rule of the Web
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> These Failed Apps Discovered a Hidden Rule of the Web
> Anonymous apps like Secret and Yik Yak set out to make social media more authentic. Here’s why that failed.
> By Miranda Katz
> Mar 10 2017
> <https://backchannel.com/these-failed-apps-discovered-a-hidden-rule-of-the-web-391471ca5952>
>
> Four days after the election of Donald Trump, the former CEO of a failed anonymous social media app tweeted: “Secret 
> V2 is coming. It’s too important for it to not exist.” About a year and a half earlier, Secret had shut down, 
> overwhelmed by an epidemic of cyberbullying and competition from Yik Yak. But as America woke up to the fact that 
> polling and data had failed to capture the political leanings of the country, the power of the unspoken was more 
> apparent than ever. Shell-shocked Democrats were viewing their more right-leaning friends and family with newly 
> skeptical eyes, wondering if they had kept quiet on mainstream social media for fear of being attacked.
>
> Meanwhile on Reddit, a community of diehard Trump supporters had swelled to some 270,000 subscribers—now nearly 
> 380,000—sharing memes, discussing their fervor for Trump and dislike of Clinton, and, yes, penning some loosely coded 
> bigotry under the shelter of anonymity. There, legions of Trump supporters felt free to express their opinions. But a 
> liberal voter who didn’t know to visit /r/The_Donald might never see those points of view. That kind of disconnect 
> raised a question in the mind of Secret’s former CEO, David Byttow: Would the world look notably different to us if 
> the people in our social networks didn’t feel like they had to censor their thoughts?
>
> The original Secret app, which launched in early 2014, allowed users to post anonymously and view anonymous posts 
> from their friends, in what Byttow envisioned as the “anti-Facebook, where you can actually say shit that represents 
> your most authentic self, as opposed to your best self.”
>
> At their height, Secret and similarly anonymous apps like Yik Yak and Whisper were hailed as the future of social 
> media — an antidote to the real-name controversies on Facebook and the highly polished, hyper-curated look of 
> Instagram. Anonymous apps harkened back to the bare-bones message boards that brought early internet culture to life, 
> but reinvented them for the social network age. Yet despite a collective $200 million in funding, anonymity has 
> remained a kind of kryptonite for social apps. The reason is simple: An online social network serves one purpose, to 
> connect people. Without names attached, people’s words become either mean — or meaningless.
>
> When they first showed up, identity-free social media apps were a viral hit—including on my own college campus. For 
> most of my time at college, anonymous discussion was limited to the “anonymous confessions board,” a rudimentary 
> forum moderated by, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, a single student. The ACB wasn’t wildly popular, and it 
> carried a certain stigma; it was the kind of site you’d delete from your “top sites” to avoid getting looks from your 
> neighbors in the library. Once, I used it to find a lost coat.
>
> Then in the fall of 2014, Yik Yak took off — and the ACB went quiet. Suddenly, it seemed like every student was on 
> the app, filling it with snarky one-liners, observations, party promotions, and, at times, malicious gossip. My 
> friends and I gleefully texted each other screenshots when one of our Yaks made it onto the “hot” page and earned 
> hundreds of upvotes. It was the perfect procrastination tool — the ACB gone mainstream, and gussied up with a slick 
> design. Yik Yak, of course, had even loftier ambitions, envisioning itself as the Twitter of the younger generation.
>
> Meanwhile Secret exploded in its own right, gaining notoriety as a hub of insidery, Silicon Valley gossip — the kind 
> of place where one might go to spread rumors of an Evernote acquisition, or discuss which startups use marijuana as 
> an interview intimidation tactic. Secret and Yik Yak grew quickly, raising $35 million and $73.5 million respectively 
> in their first seven months. They were highly addictive: Byttow says that to this day, people tell him they would 
> compulsively delete and reinstall Secret, their desire to stop wasting hours on the app at war with their FOMO. He 
> hoped to build Secret into a genuine rival to Instagram and Facebook, and for a time it seemed that his dream might 
> come true: After scoring its first taste of virality in its birthplace of Silicon Valley, Secret went on to snag the 
> #1 app store download spot in eight countries.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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