Secret shuts down

April 29, 2015 10:21 PM

Secret shuts down San Francisco, NYC, and other cities lose weird, raunchy, anonymous zeitgeist
posted by specialk420 (61 comments total)

please crash, tech market? just a little? for me? please?
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:41 PM on April 29, 2015 [11 favorites]

Still, Secret was controversial. For many, it was a morass of vitriol and catty comments, a playground for anonymous cyberbullies to take potshots at others. Secret scrambled to hire community moderators to control the negative posts. People inside Secret said it was not prepared to deal with the flood of negative posts.

They had apparently never encountered human beings? Human beings on the internet? Hope the founder with the Ferrari enjoys the ride. {/}
posted by rtha at 10:42 PM on April 29, 2015 [19 favorites]

[Gen-x voice]

Oh, my, look. A tech thing that people invested in super-fast despite it having some warts in the business model simply because it was a flashy tech novelty, and now are all surprised that it collapsed. When have we ever seen this happen before, I wonder?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:46 PM on April 29, 2015 [35 favorites]

please crash, tech market? just a little?
At this moment, Twitter appears to be leading the downward spiral, so focus your potential schadenfreude in that direction.

and don't forget, there's a hamburger emoji now: 🍔
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:00 PM on April 29, 2015 [13 favorites]

Closing Secret “has been the hardest decision of my life easiest decision made by my investors and one that saddens me deeply,” Mr. Byttow wrote on Wednesday.
posted by benzenedream at 11:06 PM on April 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

I tried the app and found it excruciatingly dull. The FIFA World Cup was on at the time, and every time I logged in, I saw the same stupid "secret" about not caring for football/soccer. What a waste of anonymity.
posted by peripathetic at 11:07 PM on April 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

But the news had broken that David Byttow and Chrys Bader, the founders of Secret, had sold part of their stake in the company for $6 million

But which pension fund did they defraud to get that $6 mil? Shhhhh... It's a secret!
posted by ennui.bz at 11:30 PM on April 29, 2015 [10 favorites]

Nice con! I applaud their deceit.
posted by Renoroc at 12:56 AM on April 30, 2015

“I believe in failing fast in order to go on and make only new and different mistakes.”

Really says it all doesn't it.
posted by NervousVarun at 2:02 AM on April 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

Mr. Byttow’s once-prized red Ferrari is also gone, a person with knowledge of the matter said.
posted by infinitewindow at 2:21 AM on April 30, 2015

16 months from start-up to "fuck you."

Yet another attempt to create enough hype in short order to cash in on a buy-out. Been happening for decades now. Guess people are still chasing after that dream of "fuck you" money, as long as it continues to fuel Silicon Valley.
posted by krinklyfig at 3:12 AM on April 30, 2015

You needed to give it access to your contact list and/or your Facebook credentials to use it (beyond cursory browsing) and that it just a non-starter for any app or website.

I AM LOOKING AT YOU, LINKEDIN
posted by potsmokinghippieoverlord at 3:14 AM on April 30, 2015 [11 favorites]

More proof that startups are (by and large) not sustainable businesses. The startup business model seems to be: burn through VC cash providing a loss-leading free service, usually of a social nature, in the hope that a critical mass of people get into the habit of using it to flirt/kvetch/zap cat memes at each other, and then either Google/Facebook/Microsoft/someone will buy it and the millions of punters in the hope of monetising the social graph, or if that fails, do a bait and switch, changing your service to a completely different service (i.e., FourSquare), introducing a premium paid tier and squeezing the free-riders (Spotify, Tinder) or bombarding the users with ads in the hope that the social graph will keep them coming back and advertisers will find being in their faces worth paying for. If that fails, the service sleeps with the fishes and Google Reader.
posted by acb at 3:15 AM on April 30, 2015 [13 favorites]

I'm normally first in the queue for a startup hate-on, but these seems like a pretty victimless crime story to me. Guy makes a stupid app; gets money from stupid VC people; app fails. It's not like anyone is going to be sad to see it go, or that anyone wanted it in the first place. How is this different from starting a rock band?
posted by colie at 3:20 AM on April 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

People inside Secret said it was not prepared to deal with the flood of negative posts.

I can't help but think that this is a side effect of the architecture and design folks not having a more wide-ranging awareness of people's experiences online. Diversity is not just a happy corporate buzzword, people.
posted by rmd1023 at 3:35 AM on April 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

waste of anonymity

A good sockpuppet user name, right there
posted by thelonius at 3:49 AM on April 30, 2015 [9 favorites]

How on earth did they expect to monetize this?
posted by oceanjesse at 3:51 AM on April 30, 2015

i was very confused at the headline because i thought it was talking about the highly un-raunchy deoderant that is available in many places outside of those cities
posted by NoraReed at 3:53 AM on April 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

How is this different from starting a rock band?

Generally, most failing rock bands aren't responsible for many people's livelihoods or burning through VC money. It's the former especially - you're messing with your employees' lives.
posted by Dysk at 3:53 AM on April 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm normally first in the queue for a startup hate-on, but these seems like a pretty victimless crime story to me. Guy makes a stupid app; gets money from stupid VC people; app fails. It's not like anyone is going to be sad to see it go, or that anyone wanted it in the first place. How is this different from starting a rock band?

Rock bands aren't tradeable on the stock market.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:59 AM on April 30, 2015

More proof that startups are (by and large) not sustainable businesses.

The silicon valley company that I used to work for was founded in '99 and as far as I know has yet to make a single year's profit but keeps managing to get more VC money to keep it going. I have no idea how that works or how any of the investors expect to get a penny back.
posted by octothorpe at 4:09 AM on April 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

You know you're old when you've never heard of the tech company the Times is eulogizing.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:19 AM on April 30, 2015 [22 favorites]

How on earth did they expect to monetize this?

The founders monetized it right into $6 million. How? Selling it on.
posted by chavenet at 4:23 AM on April 30, 2015

The traditional process of forming a rock band and signing a record deal is pretty similar to any other form of touting for investment in something that might entertain people. A record label takes a bet on the band and gives them enough money to record their music and go on tour. If nobody likes the records everyone goes home - including those who had jobs in the overall process...?
posted by colie at 4:30 AM on April 30, 2015

f nobody likes the records everyone goes home - including those who had jobs in the overall process...?

Generally not. Most everyone who is waged rather than taking a cut (read: pr people, studio techs, pressing plant operators, etc, etc) are employed by the label and move on to the next band if someone gets dropped.
posted by Dysk at 4:38 AM on April 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

OK fair enough. Although I think the pressing plant operators must have gone home quite a while ago.
posted by colie at 4:53 AM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

You needed to give it access to your contact list and/or your Facebook credentials to use it

Another flash-in-the-panopticon bites the dust.
posted by argonauta at 5:28 AM on April 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

How on earth did they expect to monetize this?

"I have colon cancer"

THIS LIFE CHANGING SECRET BROUGHT TO YOU BY ALL BRAN. ALL BRAN. 18 GRAMS OF FIBRE PER SERVING KEEPS YOUR DIGESTIVE SYSTEM HEALTHY!!!
posted by eriko at 5:34 AM on April 30, 2015 [13 favorites]

Let's not actually pray for a tech crash. That would hurt a lot of people. How about just a nice start-up "right-sizing?" Anyone who does not manufacture a useful product and/or cannot show a clear path to profitability please show yourselves out.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:59 AM on April 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

As pyramid schemes go this was pretty tame. In this case the only people actually hurt by this clear faddish joke failure were VCs. Who deserve far worse. Oh and the people slandered by the stupid app. If your feelings were hurt by a shitty secret post please stop by this thread to pick up your class action share of schadenfreude.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:01 AM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Rock bands aren't tradeable on the stock market.
Counterexample
posted by thelonius at 6:10 AM on April 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

I can't help but think that this is a side effect of the architecture and design folks not having a more wide-ranging awareness of people's experiences online. Diversity is not just a happy corporate buzzword, people.
rmd1023

Nah, they just didn't care. Even straight white guys know the Internet is a shitty place. These guys just didn't care about the problem until it became a problem for the company.
posted by Sangermaine at 6:13 AM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

You know you're old when you've never heard of the tech company the Times is eulogizing.

Indeed. I had to click the link just to make sure my deodorant wouldn't be discontinued.
posted by crazycanuck at 6:22 AM on April 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

Rock bands aren't tradeable on the stock market.

Hey...I just had a GREAT idea for a start-up!
posted by happyroach at 6:51 AM on April 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

Is this the one where people posted a confession and it matched it with an apposite picture? If so, I downloaded it, nostalgic for the days of LJSecret, and found people were mostly using it as text-based Tinder.

Isn't Yik Yak doing exceptionally well at the moment, though? Maybe only one of these things makes money, or maybe it's because it seems to have been widely adopted by students.
posted by mippy at 6:54 AM on April 30, 2015

"Apps like Secret become an outlet for people to speak honestly about things that would otherwise result in career damage,” Mr. Ohanian said. He did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

I see what you did there...
posted by vorpal bunny at 6:58 AM on April 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

Isn't Yik Yak doing exceptionally well at the moment, though?

It's been getting some bad press however - geofencing by colleges and high schools could doom its long-term prospects.
posted by aught at 7:01 AM on April 30, 2015

I downloaded it, and as my office is near UCL, I got lots of student-related posts. It made me feel so very, very old. Nothing that seemed particularly mean or libellous, though....though I am SO glad such things didn't exist when I was at high school.
posted by mippy at 7:55 AM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Rock bands aren't tradeable on the stock market.

Hey...I just had a GREAT idea for a start-up!
posted by happyroach

I work for a small university's college of business and have 100% for-real heard MBA students trying to figure out how to make that a workable thing they can monetize.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 7:58 AM on April 30, 2015

I had thought yik yak wasn't too bad but then I read an interview with the founders and now I want it to fail more terribly than anything before it in the history of mankind.
posted by poffin boffin at 8:18 AM on April 30, 2015

Why, what did they say?
posted by Sangermaine at 8:31 AM on April 30, 2015

So basically it failed for the exact same reason the PostSecret app failed.
posted by Small Dollar at 8:36 AM on April 30, 2015

There used to be a stock market for bands - it was called Popex. Back in the days when people thought monetising the internet could only be done via cybersquatting, When BBC 3 started, they had their own version, CelebDaq.
posted by mippy at 8:40 AM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

I am so tired of hearing about the economic vitality of "innovation!" = chasing latest consumer-dependent trendy hotness that is fleeting by definition. Ugh, why can't all these VC people with their zillions of dollars decide to invest in something like, oh, the return of a solid US manufacturing sector in durable goods, transportation and utility infrastructure, sustainable agriculture, education...
posted by desuetude at 8:50 AM on April 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

Ugh, why can't all these VC people with their zillions of dollars decide to invest in something like, oh, the return of a solid US manufacturing sector in durable goods, transportation and utility infrastructure, sustainable agriculture, education...

All of those things would drive up the cost of servants.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 8:53 AM on April 30, 2015 [10 favorites]

then either Google/Facebook/Microsoft/someone will buy it and the millions of punters in the hope of monetising the social graph

Actually far more likely that people want to get acquihired. Hiring is sufficiently hard that a lot of companies would rather just buy other companies for the team alone, rather than try to figure out how to solve it.
posted by asterix at 9:16 AM on April 30, 2015

It's been getting some bad press however - geofencing by colleges and high schools could doom its long-term prospects.

The geofencing is something YikYak does itself, not something forced upon it. They do geofence the app at high schools for the obvious reasons; when the HS kids come for a week to my university's theatre camp YikYak is even more annoying than usual. But I'm not aware of any colleges they've geofenced.

Some colleges are blocking apps like YikYak on their firewall/wireless networks. However, this is laughably ineffectual given that it only runs on smartphones and almost every smartphone has a data plan.
posted by sbutler at 9:36 AM on April 30, 2015

I tried the app and found it excruciatingly dull. The FIFA World Cup was on at the time, and every time I logged in, I saw the same stupid "secret" about not caring for football/soccer. What a waste of anonymity.

I never actually used the app but had some friends who were fairly into it, and if there's anything interesting about what Secret was, it's that it seemed to take on a markedly different flavor in different areas. In the Bay Area, the gossip was largely around tech biz stuff; in DC, it was all about the gay community's personal vendettas.* Curious to know what it morphed into elsewhere.

*The one thing of value for me was that when a fairly self-promoting acquaintance bemoaned on Facebook that he had become a topic of some conversation on Secret, I finally found the will to block his updates from my FB feed.
posted by psoas at 9:42 AM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

I AM LOOKING AT YOU, LINKEDIN

No, seriously, I'm looking at you, Linkedin. Because my inbox is full of emails from you via people who failed to opt out of whatever option it is that tells Linkedin to email everyone they ever knew.
posted by Hoopo at 9:44 AM on April 30, 2015 [7 favorites]

psoas, I live in the Bay Area, which is why I signed up for it! ^^
posted by peripathetic at 11:30 AM on April 30, 2015

" VC people with their zillions of dollars decide to invest in something like, oh, the return of a solid US manufacturing sector in durable goods, transportation and utility infrastructure, sustainable agriculture, education"

So you're saying that they're not? I mean, we have startups working on 3d printing, vertical farming, self-driving cars as public transportation, and we have online schools that offer free education. Just because you see examples of VC funding that you find bad doesn't mean that there isn't any good VC funding.
posted by I-baLL at 11:36 AM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

You guys misunderstand. VC is a not-very-elaborate way for old white men to transfer money to young white men. The whole "profitability" thing, much like the notion of "running a business" are just a smokescreen. Or at least that is the only way I can explain the vast incompetence that is the hallmark of almost every startup I have ever worked for.

On the other hand, working in tech helped me get out of credit card debt, so all boats are rising!
posted by dame at 11:57 AM on April 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

Favorite quote:

"... it was a turning point, said people close to Secret, who spoke on condition of anonymity."
posted by hanov3r at 12:38 PM on April 30, 2015

Omg that is the finest mansplain I ever did saw.
posted by dame at 3:21 PM on April 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

You might have to explain what you mean by that. I'm not sure I understand, actually.
posted by the jam at 4:24 PM on April 30, 2015

You might have to explain what you mean by that. I'm not sure I understand, actually.

I'm not defending it as a great societal critique of behavior, but I feel like it's important to understand the thing you're not grasping. The word choice of the word "mansplain" does actually make sense, at least on an informal level. No one uses such a loaded word simply to offend the person they're speaking about -- they're doing it to drive home the point in no uncertain terms that the behavior thus explained was condescending in a particularly gender-based way.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:34 PM on April 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

Thanks. Apologies if I crossed the line.
posted by the jam at 4:52 PM on April 30, 2015

Hoopo: "I AM LOOKING AT YOU, LINKEDIN

No, seriously, I'm looking at you, Linkedin. Because my inbox is full of emails from you via people who failed to opt out of whatever option it is that tells Linkedin to email everyone they ever knew."

So glad I apparently only know losers.
posted by Samizdata at 5:29 PM on April 30, 2015

Yeah you pretty much explained VC to me like I didn't know the rationale behind it when (a) I know how startups work and (b) my joke is in fact a critique of how these "logical" & "objective" structures actually serve to reinforce race & class privilege. I have to understand the things you condescendingly described for the joke to even work. It might have been inadvertent but it was definitely deep mansplain.
posted by dame at 6:49 PM on April 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

So glad I apparently only know losers.

If only that was it...its 75% my retired family members who decided to join a professional networking site for some reason. And it's not just once, I get them repeatedly from the same people. I don't know if it's because I refuse to join or not
posted by Hoopo at 6:54 PM on April 30, 2015

> So you're saying that they're not? I mean, we have startups working on 3d printing, vertical farming, self-driving cars as public transportation, and we have online schools that offer free education. Just because you see examples of VC funding that you find bad doesn't mean that there isn't any good VC funding.

I'm not talking about startups working on Ideas. I'm talking about all of the jobs -- non-service-sector, non-administrative jobs -- where people used to go to earn a living.
posted by desuetude at 7:18 PM on April 30, 2015 [2 favorites]