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Yahoo! Takes Down News Message Boards
hondo77 writes "Yahoo! has taken down their news message boards. According to the message from General Manager Neil Budde, 'Over the next few months, we plan to offer new discussion forums based on topics in the news and incorporating the latest features to foster a better discussion for all of our readers.' Okay, I can understand wanting to fix the boards so they're more useful but to take them down for months before a replacement is released?"
Yahoo said they'd bring back the rooms they deleted last year, except the pedo ones of course.
After a few months of no action I gave up on them.
I took a brief look at the Y! message boards once...the incivility of the "discourse" I found there made /. look like the British Parliament.
You know, I keep hearing this repeated over and over again, but I really don't think it's true. There are plenty of examples of contrary views getting modded up highly. For example, the second comment on the recent story about how Microsoft is abusing personal data is saying that it's fine what Microsoft is doing. This clearly goes against the slashdot "groupthink" as you call it, and yet it's rated a 5. There are plenty more examples in that story and in nearly every other controversial article.
Though it's cute to complain about the dominant subcultures of slashdot directing the discussion when one's dissenting comment gets modded down, many trolls are just that: trolls. I've found that on slashdot people with dissenting views who state them civilly and intelligently tend to get modded highly, while troll moderations seems mostly reserved for those who are determined to make jackasses of themselves, regardless of their views.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
As bad as many yahoo boards can be, there are people who hang out there. Yahoo has a long history of arbitrarily and instantly destroying online communities which have many years of history. You can't just re-create a community. Does anyone have a clue at yahoo?
Yahoo did the same thing with the finance message boards a few months ago. With no warning, they forced everyone over to a new user interface that was extremely bad and poorly tested.
It immediately stifled discussion and massive numbers of long time posters fled to alternate services. There are many reasons users camp out on a particular stock message board.. I know folks who have over 10K posts on a single stock board and who have been there for 7 or 8 years. Long time investors, former and current employees and friends and family, the company is local, etc. And, of course, community.. Those communities have value. That yahoo has been unable to preserve them shows just how far they are from monetizing them..
During the transition to the new interface, some message boards were lost in the shuffle. A lot of those people were investors, you know, people with money.. Seems like a pretty good demographic. Does anyone understand business at yahoo? FWIW, yahoo had a terrible quarter shortly after the finance board overhaul. They blamed it on reduced ad views.. Wonder if the reduced finance board traffic was part of that?