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. 
 
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 Close ||||| 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 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."