It's because check-ins don't work. After the novelty wears off, nobody wants to check in. Nobody. Like those stupid plastic awareness bracelets, check-ins were a fad that flared briefly and is now completely, 100% over.

So if you're a company whose entire product identity was based on check-ins, you have two choices:

1) Come up with something, anything else that can be plausibly jammed into your app, and run with that; or

2) Go out of business.

Unsurprisingly they went with #1, even if from the perspective of retaining some shred of dignity #2 would have been the better choice.

But the problem, 4sq currently piss off those people who like to check-in. Most of the people I know, don't like Swarm and either have not made the move or stopped using Swarm. I myself, also almost stopped using Swarm. Because they reduced and modified the gaming aspect so that is no fun anymore.

The problem here is, if those people with the check-ins are going missing from the platform, because of those issues. Then the people fulling the database and as such the recommendation engine are going lost. That is long term problem.

The thing is, there was no need to separate it. They could have implemented the personal search the same way as they do it now. They even could have changed to hide or show the Check-in depending on how I have signed in.

There's a lot of merit to this IMO. Foursquare the brand is completely and 100% associated with checking in to places. It seems silly to break the checkin feature into a completely new app, under a completely new brand, while trying to convince everyone that Foursquare is no longer Foursquare but is stilled called Foursquare.

IMO the better move was to keep Foursquare around but launch a separately-branded app for the discoverability.

The number of active people checking in is certainly low, but general mass-market awareness of their (former?) line of business is quite high.

So on top of convincing people your discoverability features are great, you have to first convince them that your app isn't what they already think it is. Personally I think this is very poor branding.

Everything I've seen anecdotally points to Foursquare having a small core of highly active users (people who check in multiple times a day), with a very, very, very long tail of infrequent/never users.

I have no inside information on this, but I'm also willing to bet that their current daily check-in rate is lower than what it was at their peak. The whole checkin phenomenon came and went, and while it's not gone entirely, it's simply no longer relevant to the mass market. "Millions" of checkins a day is, frankly, very low for a consumer tech product that has existed for 5 years and taken $160mm in funding.

But that doesn't really matter, because we can resolve the dispute with a simple question: if check-ins were a mass-market thing, would Foursquare (and everyone else who tried them, like Facebook) be running away from them?

The answer is no, obviously. If they worked, companies would be piling in, not checking out. But they don't, so they are.

</Hacker News>

On a similar note, I could list the reasons why checking in is, in fact, nothing like "those stupid plastic awareness bracelets". But that would be a waste of everyone's time.

But since my use of hyperbole (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole) clearly touched some deep vein with you, how about this:

"An insignificant number of people, too small to provide a VC-backed startup with even a minimally acceptable exit, want to check in anymore."

Feel free to mentally substitute this version for my earlier, more-fun-to-read-while-still-making-the-same-point version whenever you browse this thread.

You're welcome.

"Literally" also had a second meaning of "figuratively" for the last century or two. So your attempt is, once again, ambiguous.

'Coz there's a huge difference (inasmuch as the Valley might want to forget this).

Let's look at the upside of all of this though. And this is an important lesson which shows in part why it's not good to be to smart and know to much. Someone who knew better would know not to even try doing a foursquare type app. To much friction, little reward (long term) and "check-ins don't work". Someone who doesn't goes ahead and gives it a try, builds a company, and now pivots to something else which may very well work. Which kind of dovetails with the VC model. Don't try to hard to think what will work just make a bunch of bets on a team and keep your fingers crossed that something good will happen along the way to failure.

But check-ins are very much still a thing here in Rio. Of course, I only do check-ins at interesting places anymore (who has the time to fill up their meals in My Fitness Pal or whatever), and so do the four friends I have on Foursquare. It's a more intimate thing.

I'm not convinced that's ever going to be mass-market behaviour, though.

Foursquare has huge brand recognition, and it would take a long time to build that up for their new app (which will be the way 4Sq makes money going forward).

EDIT: Put the word useless inside the quotes rather than outside — I like 4sq!

This is how I've been using Foursquare for the last two years and have found it to be a more enjoyable experience. The like it or don't like it review model just works better for me, not to mention the reviews on Foursquare are not nearly as painful as ones on Yelp. I think they could have done it without creating such a jarring experience, but I feel they waited too long and now are trying to force it too much.