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 worth less than the ever-present cost/risk of policing random contributions. (Which is also why file attachments were the first to go.)
For anybody looking for a replacement, I can recommend groups.io (no affiliation), which also has a pretty smooth migration tool and has a completely adequate free "Basic" tier: https://groups.io/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Japan [2] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/ja...
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
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.
It's just lower down the page
Dear Yahoo Group Moderators and Members,
We launched Yahoo Groups 20 years ago to connect people around their shared interests. We helped our users navigate new towns, keep in touch with college friends, learn new skills, and most importantly, build connections they may have lost or never had in the first place. While we could not have been more proud of what we accomplished together, we are reaching out today with heavy hearts to let you know that we have decided to shut down Yahoo Groups on December 15, 2020.
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. To that end, we must sometimes make difficult decisions regarding products that no longer fit our long-term strategy as we hone our focus on other areas of the business.
Beginning December 15, 2020 the Yahoo Groups website will shut down and members will no longer be able to send or receive emails from Yahoo Groups. We’ve compiled a comprehensive FAQ here that includes alternative providers and information on how this will impact your group content.
Thank you for helping us build one of the earliest digital communities — we’re proud and honored to have forged countless connections over the last 20 years and played a small part in helping build your communities.
Sincerely, The Yahoo Groups team
Let's not forget yahoo brought this entirely on themselves by breaking standard email handling.
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/J-IsfA0Lb-6T_NeMD...
From that day forward all yahoo addresses became second class citizens on every email list and got either banned or had special rewrite rules applied only to them. And every mailing list hosted on yahoo groups had broken email headers. Despite the damage, they inexplicably held onto this change and got slowly filtered out of email relevance. That kickstarted the migration off yahoo email & groups.
If they hadn't done this, all the long-lived email lists would've kept happily chugging along.
Certainly goes into the Top 10 Dumb Decisions of Internet History.
They dropped the ball so hard, it just did not bounce back after that. "Lately", every time I duck (DDG) something and I see it's a yahoo hosted site, I just close it and go to the next. I am in Europe, GDPR is, thankfully, the rule here, and the number of <bad word> trackers, advertisers, and other crap that I have to agree with to read something in the Yahoo universe is "too damn high" (to quote the meme).
Goodbye Yahoo, we had a good ride, and then you messed it up, HARD. Yahoo managed to mess up so many things.. (I dislike Yahoo mostly for the Tumblr fiasco).
Farewell and adieu fair Spanish ladies..
I wonder what will happen to Google and Facebook in the next twenty years.
But it'll be slow attrition, it felt a lot quicker for Yahoo once Google caught traction in search.
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 boffins in the lab, cooking up some crazy new thing - and they don't realize that the beefiest part of R&D happens in the market. You build a giant new thing, and only when it's actually in the hands of tons of people do you really figure out what the hell it's "for". When the web first came out it was useless. Things like webmail, wikipedia, online video - these made the web useful. But these took another 20-30 years to build! MULTIPLE DECADES! People don't realize how insanely slow technology develops - everyone thinks tech is moving really fast, but it's actually a very slow industry.
What's scared me about Google - and the first really "black mark" was Wave, was them starting to pull the life support on these fundamentally viable products years, even decades, before the world had a chance to figure out what the hell they were for. Google was uniquely suited to try these things, in a way almost no other companies can, because they, uniquely, had an almost evergreen fountainhead of revenue. Ads are not going away, and if Google ever lost its hegemony over them, no amount of cost-control would save the company. So cost-control is completely useless for them - it cannot help them if they're in trouble, and it's only a negative if they're not in trouble. The only sensible behavior is to fanatically defend that revenue stream, but then to also be completely, ludicrously promiscuous with the cash they've got. To spend money in ways that would give business management schools heartattacks. Because that is something they, alone, can do.
There's a similar tragedy with Glass - and that one, at least, I can clearly see what it was for, but google axed it because decision-makers in the company thought it was another useless toy. Glass would have been a godsend for a ton of working, specialist professions, to essentially have a pilot-like HUD giving them critical information. Imagine a surgeon using glass to get live vitals on the patient - hell - imagine a surgeon using glass with an adaptive machine-learning program that matches prior CAT scans to the living tissues the surgeon is operating on, and helps guide them to the site of i.e. a cancerous tumor, or a foreign object in a wound.
Or imagine a construction worker using Glass to place pieces of the wooden framework of a house they're building - guiding themselves with an AR projection of the blueprint.
The possibilities are absolutely wild.
But then, before the proverbial plane was even allowed to do its first flight, they cut the funding and just chopped everything. Glass was just, gone.
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That's the thing that scares me about Google right now - as long as they're tight-fisted (or really: not promiscuous) about money like this, they've lost their ability to meaningfully innovate. At the rate things are going, nothing weird enough to be game-changing is gonna get a chance. That aspect of having a "useless toy" phase isn't an accident - it pretty much is absolutely mandatory for every product that's been a civilization changer.
We don't know what they're for, because we haven't "changed our culture" yet. For example - people had no analogous behavior to "making a quick phone call" before it existed. Phones had to be out there - and be in the hands of enough people you'd want to call, before the average person reflexively thought "oh, gosh, I could just call that person!". Before teenagers could kill half-hours sitting by the window with a phone to their ear; the time-cost of walking, beforehand, just made casual conversations like that impossible (unless the person was literally in your neighborhood). It changed our culture; just like cars did. Or TV. This, by the way, is why all those old-timey predictions of the future are always comedically inaccurate - it's because they're blind to a change in future culture.
The other thing is we haven't "built the infrastructure" - if you build something like Glass, if it's gonna be worth a damn you have to wait the full decade or two that it takes to build out all those pipe-dream apps like Surgery AR. They just take a long time to build. (Analogy: cars were useless until you could reasonably expect to be able to buy gasoline at, and have flat roads leading to, your destination).
And furthermore - you've gotta build the "economic ecosystem" so that all the people making those apps believe that your platform - your google glass - is going to be a firm "bedrock" to build what's basically going to be their entire career, on. If they're building a serious, professional tool like that hypothetical Surgeon's AR, it's as deep of a rabbit-hole dive as something like ProTools or Photoshop. It's like getting married. If you start an app like that you're gonna be building that for the rest of your life, if it's going to be any good. So the platform vendor has to convince you and everybody that this platform is going to be around "forever".
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And that trust - that trust of "support something forever" is something Google's torpedoed. If they come up with something genuinely cool, you'll get some kooky startups messing around with it but you're going to scare away all the lifers. And as a result, you're never going to get the god-tier professional tools that create a new industry. You'll never get the equivalent of ProTools, or Photoshop, or Blender.
Which means they're doomed to stay toys, fizzle out after a few years, and quietly get put out to pasture.
It's very similar to what happened to Xerox. Crazy stuff getting built in the labs, but a company struggling to understand it needs that product to be artificially spoon-fed to the public for multiple years before humanity understands what the hell they're supposed to do with it.
It bugs me partly because I don't want them to have the same sort of business troubles Xerox had, but it also bugs me because this sort of behavior stagnates the human race's tech development. Because if google isn't doing these sorts of "grand experiments" - nobody else can. Nobody else can operate on that scale.
I agree, if only for one you didn't mention, Yahoo Games, which I have some fond memories of.
I didn't use the other Yahoo stuff much, but it's a shame, and quite strange, that such a big name from the late 1990s/early 2000s, that I don't remember/know of as being evil in the way other internet giants seem to be, has just withered away. TBH, I thought Yahoo Groups was shut down years ago.
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.
The (one) group I followed basically disbanded in the year following the "new" launch. I think it's about a year ago they officially closed it down, activity moved to a Facebook group and a subreddit. It's a pity really, I miss the mailing list architecture.
AOL is in a similar position. There are enough legacy customers to justify keeping the power on.
I'm now waiting for the mess that will be caused by the shut down of yahoo mail and the inability to access/regain the accounts on different platforms associated to these mail addresses.
It's amazing how quickly they lost it all though, and I can't for the life of me understand it. None of what they did was new, they just did it better (or well enough) and had the marketshare to keep people there.
What happened? And how do you decide that stripping away products people use is the way forward? What's the point of the Yahoo name, if everything that made it Yahoo is gone?
Out of interest does anyone know what they consider their premium, trustworthy content?
yahoo news, sports and finance. HuffPost, techcrunch and Engadget. Various other smaller properties they own.
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.
I’ve had to fight delivery problems with that steamer for about 15 years now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201014053226/https://uk.help.y...
