Slashdot Mirror
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?"
It's Yahoo message boards. I 100% guarantee that anybody smart enough to have an opinion worth considering is not affected in the least by this - so why does it matter?
--Ryv
Let's face it... too much spam and off topic posts are the reasons Yahoo took down the boards, not to improve the board itself.
Translation: we couldn't beat the trolls, so we took down the bridge?
.. Michael Richards, high on drugs, screaming "NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER I HATE NIGGERS" over and over again for hours and hours. Add to that an evangelic Christian screaming "FIND CHRIST" at the top of his lungs, once every 45 minutes precisely. Finally, imagine an overweight 40-year old divorced mother crying and saying "why is everybody so mean".
This is what the Yahoo boards were like. They were worst than useless.
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.
From the Header:
SLASHDOT. NEWS for nerds. Stuff that matters.
Judging from this crowd, (myself included,) it appears you are correct.
Newsvine always seems to have a pretty high signal to noise ratio. I'm not at all familiar with how Yahoo's message groups used to work. I can tell you that Newsvine has a very interesting formula going for a user driven interactive news site.
For those who never used the Yahoo! News message boards, here is a simple analogy which explains (without resorting to quoting 99% of the garbage on said boards):
Yahoo! News Message Boards were to intelligent discourse as toilet paper is to the great classics from English Literature.
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
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?