[netcan]

Until they killed the comments section a few months ago, yahoo news (comments) seemed in the same league as a reddit or whatnot for a lot of news. There would be hundreds or thousands of posts on most daily news items.

Yahoo slipped into a segment of invisible people. The volume is there, but the people are middle aged late adopters... very far from the cultural centre of gravity. They're affected by the conversation elsewhere but don't affect it.

It's like that random singer-songwriter no one seems to have heard about in years, but still packs stadiums.

[pgrote]

>Until they killed the comments section

Excellent take.

The comments were filled with additional information and there was a community. I understand why they got rid of them due to creeping toxicity, but they didn't even try to improve it before killing it.

[netcan]

Cheers.

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.