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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.
Indeed: with private dedicated servers and VPSes getting cheaper and cheaper, there's less and less of an excuse to rely on public servers.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
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.
Change is hard for a lot of people. Yahoo Groups, unfortunately is stuck running some really ancient "forum" software that really isn't designed to be a forum at all. It's designed to be an email list. I use Yahoo Groups daily, and it really needs to incorporate modern features. Neo brings a lot of basic forum features to Yahoo Groups, like inline attachments. The people asking for the old format back, change is hard, embrace it and move forward. Ask Yahoo to fix bugs you find in Neo, that will be much better for the community than to continue being stuck in the old ways.
Joseph Elwell.
Why are there so few alternatives? Because egroups and onelist merged and yahoo bought them
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.
I'm becoming convinced that Yahoo is the secret troll branch of Google.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
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.
"Marissa! The users are revolting!"
"Let them eat our new interface."
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
This is why users should use open source software and run their own web sites.
That's a whole new level of technical difficulty. Many people who run yahoo groups are barely able to do it, and if you've ever used one you'll know that hosting your own is much more difficult. Not difficult at all for a tech, but for an average user?
And in other news, Google has rolled out their monthly gratuitous GMail revamp. And no one even noticed, because we've all gotten tired of hunting down the "please give me back the old interface" checkbox somewhere in the labyrinthine depths of the user options pages.
Ah well, at least Slashdot limits its retarded UI crippling and eye-bleed-inducing changes to twice a decade. Hmm, probably due any day now...
I have almost never viewed any major site's overhaul as an improvement. It usually ends up just complicating (or even rendering impossible) the things I use it for. Invariably, there was nothing "wrong" with the site's functionality as it was that needed "fixing," but they decided to mess with it anyway. Maybe I'm an old fuddy-duddy, but when something works fine as it is, I'm a firm advocate for leaving well enough alone.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
...if anyone could get the new Gmail compose to work.
Back when Google acquired Deja News I had a terrible premonition about how it would all turn out. It languished for a while, with trolls and spammers flooding groups through Google accounts and then Google finally started working on making the interface horrible.
I had some really neat newsreaders on my Sun Linux box, where were awesome for surfing news and posting, back when you needed a verified account to post. Now Google Groups is nearly abandoned, because Google opened Pandora's box upon it. A real loss there.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
But, there's always the possibility that Yahoo rolled out a shitty, ugly, and useless update and people are genuinely pissed off.
Based on what they did with email a few months ago (stuck with them since they host the webmail for my ISP), Yahoo is certainly capable of rolling out something pretty awful.
Yes, someone will always bitch about change. But sometimes, change isn't for the better. It's amazing how often web sites update their site and produce something which is utter crap. And I'm perfectly willing to believe Yahoo has done that in this case.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
I run a small site that is mostly a personal photo blog. I keep an eye on the logs, and when one of my images gets a lot of hits, it's obviously being leeched. I just replace it with Goatse or something similar. If it happened often enough, I'd automate it.
Image leaching isn't having your images taken and put up elsewhere on the web, which is a pointless to fight against if anyone wants your images bad enough. Image leaching is people linking and embedding images hosted on your server on their website. They are not only using your images, but more importantly, using your bandwidth to host their site. Of course the those people are not your customers, but they are continually using your resources, as in actual resources you don't get back when used. There are straightforward solutions to the problem, but it is yet another thing on a large pile of stuff that comes up with maintaining your own website.
If you're not charging people for your images, then leeches aren't stealing anything.
Except your bandwidth. Image leeches typically do things like linking your images to their MySpace page, or using them as the background image for some other website full of ad spam links, so you end up paying for their site. It wouldn't be so bad if they just "stole" your images by downloading them and using them themselves. The problem is that they don't download your images.
Breakfast served all day!
Change is hard for a lot of people. Yahoo Groups, unfortunately is stuck running some really ancient "forum" software that really isn't designed to be a forum at all. It's designed to be an email list. I use Yahoo Groups daily, and it really needs to incorporate modern features. Neo brings a lot of basic forum features to Yahoo Groups, like inline attachments. The people asking for the old format back, change is hard, embrace it and move forward. Ask Yahoo to fix bugs you find in Neo, that will be much better for the community than to continue being stuck in the old ways.
Joseph Elwell.
Her's a kick in the balls.
I know change is hard and you want to go back to not having swollen-blue-balls, but embrace it and move forward. Sooner or later, you'll become accustomed to me kicking you in the balls. Don't be so resistant to change.
Why wouldn't the average person want something like that, and why are there so few alternatives out there that do the job?
The problem is that, when you rely on another person to provide information, then it can disappear. They can do that a moment which is really really inconvenient to you. The "average" person has some problem thinking straight about this and will always tell you "oh I don't do anything important there" just like they say "oh there's nothing important to backup" and then find out that they lost all their grandchildren's photos. Even most of the rest of us that "know better" simply don't have the time.
Look, for example, at the recent betrayal by Groklaw, which gathered a whole load of interesting ideas and now leaves no clear place for it's community to go to.
What is needed is a reimplementation of Usenet with a limited subset of HTML (no external content) and automatic multi-source cryptographic moderation by default (so that anyone can moderate any group; nobody can censor, but you only listen to the people you want to). This could be gatewayed through tor for those that need privacy.
Anything less will always either be unusable for normal people (e.g. Freenet) or will be vulnerable to commercial destruction for example Yahoo; Groklaw; Skype; Google Reader; MSN TV.
You can sign a web petition to ask Google to let people turn it off
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/say-no-to-the-new-gmail-composer/
I always use an e-mail client, be it Outlook (at work) or Thunderbird (at home) or my iPod Touch for accessing Gmail. That way, I just bypass their 'improvements'. The only time I have to go into their mail page is to be on chats at work, and I do not access my e-mails there.
That's sort of the point though. Most of Yahoo's properties have been stagnant for years, some even for over a decade. Yahoo was the place for people who wanted web 1.0, are change resistant, and are stuck in their ways. Everyone who wanted new features or could embrace new things migrated along as better alternative popped up. Those that can't/won't remained. It's the AOL of the new millennium. It's a real challenge for Yahoo because it's a gamble that the people they will lose will be offset by newcomers.
Really, though, I think this whole "I'm taking my ball and going home" attitude is quite dumb. If you're willing to leave and learn a new platform in protest, why not stay and learn the new upgraded platform where your data already lives?
Do the updates sometimes break or remove good features? Yeah, I guess. But they've slowly been added back in over time. Basically, I see this as what Apple did with Final Cut Pro. A complete revamp that took a lot of time to gain feature parity with the version it replaced. Sometimes though it's good to clear out the dead wood so you can have a better platform for the future.
FWIW, as a paying Flickr Pro member since 2006, I love the changes. As a Fantasy Football commissioner using Yahoo as my platform since '09, I'm pretty happy with the work they are doing over there as well.
So Yahoo doesn't roll back (just like any other company who makes changes), and instead are replying to threads in the forums by saying "we are aware of the issue, this is planned to be fixed", but it is not fast enough for you.
You then write a blog about it. When that doesn't get what you want, you go to slashdot?
Sounds like someone is having a tantrum.
Sounds more like it's how the internet is supposed to work - someone does something you don't like, and instead of just having to just live with it like you would in the real world, you can actually make some noise about it and get thousands of people to listen to you. It still may not change anything, but at least you know your complaint is heard unlike when you get a form letter response saying "We are aware of the issue, and we plan to fix it. Some day. Probably. Well maybe not - who knows if anyone is even reading your feedback".
Product stages:
- crap << current Yahoo Groups
- alpha
- beta
- pray
- live!
Unless you are Google, Then it goes
Product stages:
- crap
- alpha
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- Product Canceled due to excessive usefulness or popularity!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
This debacle started around Tuesday of last week. The implementation has been so bad, it is like somebody in the Groups team woke up last Tuesday and decided to just piss all over everything. There was no warning it was coming. They just flipped the switch. Moderators were not able to approve users or messages for days. Images have gone missing in many cases. HTML formatting is broken or has been removed completely, leaving pages of gibberish. A week later there are still broken features. The problems are not even uniform across Groups. Of the dozen or so Groups I belong too, I never know from one logon to the next what will work or won't work. Thousands of people have been complaining in the support forums over the changes. This is not a case were a few people had their panties in a wad over changing a web feature from brown to yellow. Thousands of users have been dog piling onto support entries with comments. Some constructive, others, not so much. What was interesting to me was that there was virtually 0 coverage of these problems in tech media. This is the first story I have seen. If Google had done this with their groups or docs or other applications, I feel there would have been significantly more coverage. The lack of the tech media to take notice, I feel, has had a significant impact on how Yahoo has addressed these problems with the Groups changes. If Yahoo pisses off thousands of users and all the tech journo's are deaf, dumb. and blind, did it make a noise?
There's a similar though smaller revolt going on over the changes to Yahoo's Fantasy Football. The nasty thing about the Fantasy Football changes is that they didn't roll them out until two weeks before the start of the season, after lots of people had already paid as much as $250 to join pro leagues.
Yahoo went so far as to post an announcement to every league that they won't be going back to the original format (but they really appreciate your comments!).
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
Didn't you understand his point? It *is* better for him for them to copy his images than to link to them. It doesn't cost him as much.
If he were running a high volume site, and this were done by a low volume site, this wouldn't have much effect. As he's running a low volume site, it can significantly raise his expenses.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If it is on the internet, it will be stolen. Deal with it.
I didn't care about non-commercial copying of the images. It was the bandwidth usage that bothered me. My site could go down and/or I could be charged if exceeded. If I was running my own server, I'd have to get hotter hardware to handle it. That's the theft that was bothering me, not copyright violations.
Yeah, stuff gets stolen on the Internet. I DID deal with it--by no longer hosting my own web site. In fact, I frequently saw leeching from my Flickr account, and it didn't bother me one bit. I was like, "fine, now it's Yahoo's problem"; but I realized I was trading one problem for another and it ultimately bit me. On to the next trade. Get it?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I thought the same thing but figured I would check out screens of the old against the new and hear what users were complaining about. The UI is really quite a bit cleaner and better organized, but the user and moderator complaints are entirely legit. They traded substance for style. There is absolutely core functionality missing, broken, or just outright removed. I'd say this is one of the few times the screeching is warranted.
Then there's the Microsoft release cycle:
- Crap
- Alpha
- Crap
- Alpha
- Crap
- Alpha
- Crap
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
you say yourself, very succinctly I might add, why this is 'news'
Exactly! EVERY TIME...virtually...it's ridiculous and embarrassing to be that bad at design. Have you no shame??? Imagine this in another industry. Something pre-PC...say Craftsman Tools.
If Craftsman 'upgraded' from solid steel to a cheaper allow, stopped making Metric completely, and told users it was an 'improvement'
That's where we are at here...only it is worse, b/c Yahoo! spent millions on 'A/B testing'...
Google did this with their Image search. M$ does this for everything.
The computing industry is spoiled rotten. Treating end users this way is sure-fire way to destroy your company, but you have your M$'s and facebook.com's who throw the curve and give us in the industry a false expectation of how much we must cater to our user
facebook, yahoo, google....they're all on a big ego trip...they mistake the glory and riches bestowed by the computing industry as something that **they did**
in the end, the founders of these companies were competent engineers and in the right place at the right time
the functionality of their products is everyday technology...mostly software and code
ex: facebook...it's just words and pictures with a user login. the rest is shit to make Zuckerberg money. Sure their codebase is probably pretty well designed and impressive...but it is nothing that couldn't be replicated...facebook.com has to work fast enough for humans, that's it...they meet that criteria and then its just maintenence.
no innovation there...
counter example: *clickwheel* on the iPod...that's a real, actual innovation done by engineers...it solved a user interface problem AND pioneered a new tech
internet companies are going to learn a very hard lesson soon....
I hope it is my company that is doing the teaching!!!$$$!!!$$$
Thank you Dave Raggett
.
Tell you what. Let's go ahead and have you *moderate and run* (not just play with as an end user) a Yahoo group with 27,000 members in your spare time (as I do and have for many years). You get a week to do it with those "ancient" tools and interface, and then another week to do with with the badly broken, slow, ill-conceived, feature-poor, absurdly buggy new interface. After that week - if you can even get through it - come back and tell me that "Neo" is working just fine, thank you very much.
We won't even get started on your false dichotomy - that because some features might have been desired (eg inline attachments, which my users would never want or need) that it was necessary to completely revamp the entire interface and throw out about half the existing functionality to provide them.