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Yahoo Groups is closing down

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Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#61

Post by massysett »

netcan wrote: post #48
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…

Writing off a huge swath of the population as culturally irrelevant is exactly why some people wind up so stunned when events like Trump’s election occur.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#62

Post by boilerupnc »

pbreit wrote: post #10
howlgarnish wrote: post #3

The writing's been on the wall for a while: this was first announced last year, then postponed, and the online UI was already shut down in February 2020. Completely boneheaded move in that it removes the last reason many people like myself would ever even stumble into a Yahoo site, but then again, Yahoo Groups's SEO visibility is also near-zero these days, and I figure the beancounters at Yahoo computed that this is…

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

Interestingly, Yahoo Japan remains a dominant force in that particular market. "Yahoo! Japan's web portal is the most visited website in Japan, and its internet services are mostly dominant in the country." [1]. They are the number 2 search engine in terms of marketshare with almost 20% [2] . I kinda think of their unique national presence as a quasi representation of Google + Facebook + Ebay experiences all-in-one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Japan [2] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/ja...

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#63

Post by netcan »

massysett wrote: post #61
netcan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Writing off a huge swath of the population as culturally irrelevant is exactly why some people wind up so stunned when events like Trump’s election occur.

True. No disagreement. I'm not writing anyone off.

Both are true at once though. There is such a thing as "cultural centre of gravity." Ignoring what and why so much of society is outside of that is elitist by definition.

I'm not saying that it is good that yahoo comments was (despite being large) was largely invisible and ignored. I'm just acknowledging that it was. That may be a terrible thing about society, but it still is.

HN case in point. If a good sized reddit getting shut down for whatever reason, HN would know about it. Yahoo comments (which was massive) got shut down, and it didn't even crossed our consciousness. Bloggers didn't blog about it. etc.

This is the definition of cultural visibility (relevance is more emotive, but harder to define). We don't see much of it. That's demographic. If Trump, Taylor Swift & Elon Musk or even people they know were reading Yahoo comments, the cultural cache would be more like Twitter's.

BTW, the thing I'm describing exists whether or not it maps to social or political demographics. Yahoo mail was irrelevant long before gmail actually passed them. Cool, in the know people were on gmail. Your auntie was on yahoo or hotmail.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#64

Post by Macha »

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?

AOL had gone from on top of the world to collapsing to being financially profitable if not reputationally leading thanks to using the money from their shrinking dialup business to get new businesses in adtech and content. Independent Yahoo on the other hand was unprofitable.

So I'm sure the AOL higher ups pitched the same dream for Yahoo to their Verizon bosses. Take another fallen former giant, shed the deadweight, double down on new/profitable markets and also the idea that the overlap of Yahoo + AOL would cost less to run together than independently since with all the duplication there must surely be efficiencies to be made.

It's not on the face of it an unreasonable bet to make, especially when investors were looking at AT&T diversifying beyond their ISP business and imploring Verizon do _something_. Also given the older age of Verizon's execs and how that fit with Yahoo's target market, they likely had a higher opinion of the value of the yahoo brand than younger techies.

Meanwhile the shareholders of Yahoo were happy. they got their divested Alibaba holdings rather than thinking of them being used it prop up a company that was otherwise on a path to bankruptcy, and Verizon even paid them to take that off them.

As it turned out, that bet didn't work, for a variety of reasons so now all the pre merger leadership of AOL and Yahoo are gone and even was likely a factor in Verizon getting a new CEO who didn't play up this project so much and just wants it not to cost so much

At the same time you need to draw the distinction between valuable for the business vs valuable for the consumer. Tumblr had a porn culture that kept advertisers away, but changing that also drove the users away, so it didn't bring in much money, and yahoo groups didn't have the algorithmic content to allow discretion to the platform to push commercially viable content and so much of the consumption being via email and out of Yahoo's control likely meant that again it wasn't as valuable to advertisers and so worth less.

Disclaimer: I worked there through this, but not on any products mentioned here so my speculation is as much outsider based as yours.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#65

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

massysett wrote: post #61
netcan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Writing off a huge swath of the population as culturally irrelevant is exactly why some people wind up so stunned when events like Trump’s election occur.

Are you really trying to tie the rise of Trump to boomers not being able to have their Yahoo comments?

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#66

Post by basch »

boilerupnc wrote: post #62
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.

Interestingly, Yahoo Japan remains a dominant force in that particular market. "Yahoo! Japan's web portal is the most visited website in Japan, and its internet services are mostly dominant in the country." [1]. They are the number 2 search engine in terms of marketshare with almost 20% [2] . I kinda think of their unique national presence as a quasi representation of Google + Facebook + Ebay experiences all-in-one.…

A completely different company owned by Softbank and Alibaba.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#67

Post by woofie11 »

bachmeier wrote: post #60
woofie11 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think search will be quick. There isn't much stickiness there. It will be a disruptive S-curve, as soon as an upstart starts gaining traction. Given how much of a cash cow that is for Google, I think when that happens, things will spiral. I'm not sure what this spiral will look like -- it's different for each company -- but an example: * Revenue goes down. * Beancounters at Google can't continue to offer $500k comp…

> I think search will be quick. There isn't much stickiness there. It will be a disruptive S-curve, as soon as an upstart starts gaining traction. It's unlikely that any other company will outcompete Google on search. What will happen is that something better than search will come along. That wouldn't be hard, given that today's search tends to return a combination of useless garbage and paid results. A better system…

> It's unlikely that any other company will outcompete Google on search.

Why?

I understand Google has a big database, but note that we're talking products, not just technologies. A "good enough" product in one dimension can still disrupt existing products if it's better in other dimensions.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#68

Post by andyjpb »

howlgarnish wrote: post #3

The writing's been on the wall for a while: this was first announced last year, then postponed, and the online UI was already shut down in February 2020. Completely boneheaded move in that it removes the last reason many people like myself would ever even stumble into a Yahoo site, but then again, Yahoo Groups's SEO visibility is also near-zero these days, and I figure the beancounters at Yahoo computed that this is…

If I remember correctly, Groups.io was started (~2010s?) by the founder of Onelist (~mid 1990s) which merged with eGroups (~2000) and was subsequently purchased by Yahoo and became Yahoo Groups.

It just goes to show that Yahoo could have innovated to improve the product but was unable to. The original founder understood the needs and how things have changed (or not) over the past 25 years.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#69

Post by andyjpb »

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…

> I think what actually killed Wave was an insufficient focus on making the UI really slick. It may have been too early for its time, needing some of the Internet technologies that were invented later.

I think this is what Jetrel means when they mention that the good engineers were/will leave. For GMail they pioneered the technology needed to implement the UX and UI they wanted.

Why couldn't they do it again? Because they're not the same kind of company with the same kind of mindshare?

If you look at where webmail was when GMail came out and compare it to where corporate chat is now, Google just don't seem to be (successfully) taking the same advantages. I know plenty of companies who use G-Suite plus Slack.

Re: Yahoo Groups is closing down

#70

Post by jdeibele »

bpyne wrote: post #57
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's amazingly difficult to get away from. For those of us who had Yahoo email accounts, trying to get people to stop emailing them is a slow drawn out process. My wife and I switched to Gmail accounts at least 5 years ago. We still get friends and relatives sending to our Yahoo accounts. This, despite multiple requests to stop. People seem to either reply all on old messages whenever they want to contact us or copy/…

I maintain a Yahoo.com email account but I'm not sure why. I have Gmail pick up the mail using POP and that's where at least 90% of the emails in my spam folder come from.

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.

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