Yahoo Groups is closing down • Hacker News Board

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#41

Post by dwighttk » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 10:44 AM UTC

dageshi wrote: post #27

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo is such a weird company in that it does so much yet it doesn't have the mindshare. Maybe it's a completely different generation still using it, I don't know.

It is I think, my mom still uses it and still has a yahoo email address. I'm guessing there's a lot of older users for whom yahoo was good enough and is still good enough given their usage.

I watched a friend load their yahoo webmail and it had multiple auto-playing video ads (I don’t think there was sound but their audio may have been muted). I feel dirty just mentioning it.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#42

Post by dwighttk » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 10:45 AM UTC

shp0ngle wrote: post #33

pbreit wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who works at Yahoo nowadays? Do they still have offices in Sunnyvale? Everything seems on auto-pilot except for some fantasy sports opinion writers.

I think it's a AOL subsidiary and they treat it like cheap content farm, like all of the AOL brands. Or was it Verizon? Or does Verizon owns AOL? Something like that edit: yeah Verizon, AOL, Yahoo are the same company now and basically mass-producing content

Oath?

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#43

Post by dwighttk » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 10:52 AM UTC

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #8

> Yahoo Groups has seen a steady decline in usage over the last several years. Over that same period, we’ve witnessed unprecedented levels of engagement across our properties as customers seek out premium, trustworthy content. Out of interest does anyone know what they consider their premium, trustworthy content?

I haven’t used it in a few years but their fantasy sports was better than espn back then.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#44

Post by swiley » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 11:01 AM UTC

Why is it companies like Verizon buy companies like yahoo only to destroy the few things that made the company valuable? Is there some weird financial instrument that makes this profitable?

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#45

Post by netcan » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 11:09 AM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #22

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo isn’t a company anymore it’s a brand. It’s a death walk to insolvency at this point. They’ll extract whatever value they can before killing it.

Yahoo is such a weird company in that it does so much yet it doesn't have the mindshare. Maybe it's a completely different generation still using it, I don't know.

Until they killed the comments section a few months ago, yahoo news (comments) seemed in the same league as a reddit or whatnot for a lot of news. There would be hundreds or thousands of posts on most daily news items.

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.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#46

Post by netcan » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 11:10 AM UTC

shp0ngle wrote: post #33

pbreit wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who works at Yahoo nowadays? Do they still have offices in Sunnyvale? Everything seems on auto-pilot except for some fantasy sports opinion writers.

I think it's a AOL subsidiary and they treat it like cheap content farm, like all of the AOL brands. Or was it Verizon? Or does Verizon owns AOL? Something like that edit: yeah Verizon, AOL, Yahoo are the same company now and basically mass-producing content

Content farming to what end? Yahoo seems to have little SEO presence at all.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#47

Post by INTPenis » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

krisgenre wrote: post #5

I spent a good amount of my teenage using Yahoo services - Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Groups, Geocities, Yahoo Mail and of course Yahoo search. It's really sad to see them fade into oblivion. I wonder what will happen to Google and Facebook in the next twenty years.

As curious Swedish teenagers Yahoo groups was one of the places where we could talk to sub-cultures from the US and learn about underground music. Which we later pirated from Audiogalaxy or XDCC.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#48

Post by netcan » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 11:16 AM UTC

krisgenre wrote: post #5

I spent a good amount of my teenage using Yahoo services - Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Groups, Geocities, Yahoo Mail and of course Yahoo search. It's really sad to see them fade into oblivion. I wonder what will happen to Google and Facebook in the next twenty years.

A lesson to learn is that numbers aren't everything. Yahoo mail was irrelevant well before gmail surpassed them in users. The Yahoo comments sections (on news) were as active as reddit until months ago... but boomerland.

A topic might have 1,000 yahoo comments, 1,000 reddit comments and 1,000 tweets but what happens on twitter is the culturally relevant one. Reddit's weirdo-land is better than Yahoo's boomerland, but Twitter is where politicians, journalists, CEOs, artists and such hang out.

Of course, money matters too. But, yahoo lost mindshare well before they lost users.

IDK if Google will go this way, but FB probably will. Remember that fb's growth strategy was (1)Harvard (2) Ivy League (3) Colleges (4) High schools & everyone.

I suspect that whatever fb decides to do vis-a-vid censorship, politics & such... they will be thinking of who, not just how many, user like and dislike it.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#49

Post by hoseja » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 11:18 AM UTC

jcrites wrote: post #28

Jetrel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm pretty concerned about them (and several others like Apple, but we'll focus on google in this comment). I'm baffled at how google fell into this trap, because it really seems like Larry/Sergey "got it" but the thing that basically crowned google king was that unlike almost all other major tech companies, they were willing to do R&D as a massive loss-leader. And when I say R&D, most people think of just boff…

One of the sections that stood out to me about Jeff Bezos' letter to investors in 2018 was pointing out that, at the size Amazon currently is, in order to keep growing, they must make bets on scale of billions of dollars. Rather than paraphrase, let me link to and quote the original: https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/2018-letter-to-sha... > Failure needs to scale too > As a company grows, everything needs to…

Would be nice if they could also stop abstracting warehouse workers as well optimizable non-human automatons.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#50

Post by robbyt » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 11:22 AM UTC

swiley wrote: post #44

Why is it companies like Verizon buy companies like yahoo only to destroy the few things that made the company valuable? Is there some weird financial instrument that makes this profitable?

Completely guessing... 100% speculation. Yahoo likely owned several hard assets that Verizon wanted. Such as Real estate, patents, ISP bandwidth/peering agreements, IP space.