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.