Slashdot Mirror
Users Revolt Over Yahoo Groups Update
An anonymous reader writes "The new NEO format of Yahoo Groups is being rolled out to users and there is no option to go back. Users and moderators are posting messages asking Yahoo to go back to the old format. Yahoo is responding with a vanilla 'thank you for your feedback we are working to make it better' comment. Most posters are so frustrated that they just want the old site back. One poster writes 'Yahoo has effectively destroyed the groups, completely, themselves.'"
The thing is you have a service that fills all your needs, is free, and requires absolutely zero knowledge of how anything works.
Why wouldn't the average person want something like that, and why are there so few alternatives out there that do the job?
That's a silly answer for most non-technical users.
Ignoring the extra hassle of hosting, an open source project can head in a direction you don't like just as easily, and unless you are prepared to fork the product (which a non-technical user probably can't) or just let it stagnate in a soup of unpatched exploits, you are just as helpless.
When is there a major update to a platform without a "revolt"?
I used to run my own web site. The modest fees didn't bother me; but the image leaches did. There were a few other PiTA type things, but image leaching was the worst. Yeah, there are little scripts and things using the referrer tag; but then I couldn't preview my pages on my hard drive. OK, I suppose I could have run a server on localhost... but... you see where this goes. You get pulled into "tag soup" and having to install every scripting language that begins with 'P' just to show people some stupid pictures.
So. I was drawn towards Flickr. In the back of my mind I knew it could always morph into something I hated; but for the longest time it didn't. Then it got Marissa'd.
So here we are again. Some company with a business that somebody finds unsatisfying even though it's profitable. They throw away the existing customers in hopes of attracting other customers. I hope Yahoo ends up like JCPenney now.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Ignoring your users is the new in thing for corporations. From Microsoft cancelling Technet to their lack of Start Menu to Apple's upcoming flattening of IOS to Mechwarrior's ignoring users being pissed about changes or Digg's substantial drop in users with their new version a while back.
The attitude seems to be "it doesn't matter how many users we lose or alienate, were right and your wrong". Once upon a time marketing departments measured their success by number of new users gained. Nowadays UI departments seem to measure their success by number of users they lose.
Is there anything Yahoo! hasn't fucked up? First they killed Geocities; OK that one is probably not bad. Then they Bing-ified Flickr, with complete disregard for community input. Trust me, there was a lot of input, even though most of it has been disappeared. Then sports, which we recently read about. Now groups. No wonder that CEO of theirs won't let people work from home. She wants to personally see the look of agony and defeat on her employees tired, worn faces as she takes their favorite projects and warps them into a monstrous, blinged-out, totally useless pile of shit.
The protests on Flickr after changes months ago had the same result: no changes, no apologies. /. published a story about protests when some other Yahoo page changed, same result: no change, no apologies.
And just the other day
People need to understand Yahoo is marching off the cliff to the beat of its own drummer, and complaints mean nothing to them.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
If it is on the internet, it will be stolen. Deal with it.
If you don't want your "images" stolen, then don't put them up on the internet. Period.
Alternatively you can put low res images up, and let your paying folks know that they can have higher res images for whatever you think you can get out of them. If you're not charging people for your images, then leeches aren't stealing anything.
Fact of the matter is, this is settled. You can make it hard for people to leech, but it will still happen, and there is nothing you can do about it. Those people are NOT your customers.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Well, try Yahoo! The comics page has gone from "intermittently updated" to "virtually unusable." The mail apps now make it almost impossible to delete email in any other way but one at a time. Good usable interfaces are being carefully and methodically destroyed.
Is there some committee at Microsoft and Yahoo that goes around finding anything that's simple, obvious and workable and making sure that it's made unusable as quickly as possible? How does this work? Have ex-congressman moved to the software industry?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Totally with you.
I actually tried, but I can't think of any site revamp in the history of site revamps that I liked.
As someone above said, there seems to be this movement where UI (or in newspeak, "UX") experts are brought in with their doctrine of "right" and "wrong" interface design practices, and their egos which prevent them from re-evaluating their decisions when the entire user community tells them consistently and loudly that they don't like it.
When it's all over, a user either likes something or they don't. There will be an initial resistance to change, but once that's past if they are still complaining, regardless of whatever design laws you can use to justify your decision, it was wrong.
That's a nice bromide... and it's easy to blame unspecified 'people' but it's bullshit in this case. Over the last few months, Yahoo! has been rolling out change after ill thought out change in page layout, UI, and functionality. They're trying to be 'hip' and 'modern' and failing miserably while alienating their existing userbase.
Like what? And more importantly why? The system worked, and worked well.