Yahoo slipped into a segment of invisible people. The volume is there, but the people are middle aged late adopters... very far from the cultural centre of gravity. They're affected by the conversation elsewhere but don't affect it.
It's like that random singer-songwriter no one seems to have heard about in years, but still packs stadiums.
Excellent take.
The comments were filled with additional information and there was a community. I understand why they got rid of them due to creeping toxicity, but they didn't even try to improve it before killing it.
Yahoo's business model is incoherent, so it's hard to make a coherent case for or against killing that comment section. Maybe there's no commercial value in owning a lower tier (in terms of cultural equity) discussion board.
Trying to reform an online community is a bastard of a task. What's the upside?
Anyway, its notable that a "social media" of that scale got killed, and most people who know about these things barely noticed. Journalists are on twitter. Their fiends are on fb. They check reddit, even 4chan to see what the fringes are saying. I doubt most journalists are even aware when their own article "blows up on Yahoo News." It's almost embarrassing.
I suspect that fb/zuck have an eye on this kind of thing though. They are massive, and mass is very valuable in the modern economy. But they have been migrating down the rungs of cultural equity... and Zuck knows this is dangerous.
FB started at harvard, then Ivey leagues, then colleges, then the world. We've seen this pattern multiple times. Get the important people, then get everyone. Tinder, Quora and others did this perfectly.
But... beware the "Yahoo effect." Move too low down the social ladder (for lack of a better term) and you become irrelevant. This effect killed friendster too, if you remember that far back.
Cool people have been receding on FB since day 1, and eventually it'll catch up to them. They'll have most of the people, but none of the influential people.
People seem to either reply all on old messages whenever they want to contact us or copy/paste email addresses from old messages, like invitations for Christmas parties, when they contact us. Either way we can't get away from Yahoo.
The other issue is companies using email addresses as user names. Just a few days ago, I went through Yelp to order a food delivery fulfilled by Grubhub. The order confirmation listed an old Yahoo account as the contact email. This was courtesy of Yelp using the Yahoo account as my login. Yelp provides a way to add an email address and make it the primary. Not all businesses do.
If I could snap my fingers and be done with Yahoo, I'd do it. I started to move us from it when Marissa Meyer was still CEO.
About two years ago I started moving away from Gmail, and that was a lot harder. I kept checking but eventually had to just set up a vacation responder. I still check it about once every couple months, but to truly move away from an email address, you have to really stop using it.
I guess I worry about there being something out there that I used long ago and want to retrieve. And they started recycling email addresses: https://celeretech.com/blog/yahoo-begins-recycling-e-mail-ac... So there was the fear that somebody else would take over your old address.
That was a long time ago (2010) and they reversed direction but there's nothing going on with Yahoo that makes you think they won't do it again.
Lately they've shut down the comments section most of the news is delivered via opinion pieces from HuffPost, Daily Best, The Independent, The Guardian. A great shame... not sure what a good replacement would be.
