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Yik Yak pivoted away from anonymity on its platform, forcing all users to create “handles” to accompany their posts, TechCrunch reports.

This change comes with a host of new features aimed to build Yik Yak into a robust social platform around personal interactions and local communities. But by abandoning anonymity, Yik Yak is shedding a central component of identity, which could alienate its core user base and prove ruinous in the long run.

The move to de-emphasize anonymous posts on Yik Yak is understandable given the ill fortunes of other anonymous platforms. This includes like the now-deceased apps Secret and Formspring, and the alive but ailing platform Ask.fm. Each of these sites had anonymous, user-generated posts at the center of their platforms, and each experienced a promising uplift in usage before eventually fizzling out. Yik Yak has charted a similar downward trajectory in the past couple years, enduring a steady decline in in monthly app users and time spend.

That being said, the redesign is eliciting a strong backlash from its user base. The updated app is rated one out of five stars in the App Store, and many of its reviews express extreme disdain for the update, with some stating that they were deleting the app. The reaction on the Google Play Store has been similarly vociferous.

Dissatisfied users have also taken to Reddit to voice their discontent with the app update, and a single thread titled “The latest update officially killed this app” has collected over one hundred comments. It's still early days for how this update will pan out, but this could prove to be a valuable case study on the effect of a dramatic pivot.

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