[netcan]

A lesson to learn is that numbers aren't everything. Yahoo mail was irrelevant well before gmail surpassed them in users. The Yahoo comments sections (on news) were as active as reddit until months ago... but boomerland.

A topic might have 1,000 yahoo comments, 1,000 reddit comments and 1,000 tweets but what happens on twitter is the culturally relevant one. Reddit's weirdo-land is better than Yahoo's boomerland, but Twitter is where politicians, journalists, CEOs, artists and such hang out.

Of course, money matters too. But, yahoo lost mindshare well before they lost users.

IDK if Google will go this way, but FB probably will. Remember that fb's growth strategy was (1)Harvard (2) Ivy League (3) Colleges (4) High schools & everyone.

I suspect that whatever fb decides to do vis-a-vid censorship, politics & such... they will be thinking of who, not just how many, user like and dislike it.

[massysett]

Writing off a huge swath of the population as culturally irrelevant is exactly why some people wind up so stunned when events like Trump’s election occur.

[netcan]

True. No disagreement. I'm not writing anyone off.

Both are true at once though. There is such a thing as "cultural centre of gravity." Ignoring what and why so much of society is outside of that is elitist by definition.

I'm not saying that it is good that yahoo comments was (despite being large) was largely invisible and ignored. I'm just acknowledging that it was. That may be a terrible thing about society, but it still is.

HN case in point. If a good sized reddit getting shut down for whatever reason, HN would know about it. Yahoo comments (which was massive) got shut down, and it didn't even crossed our consciousness. Bloggers didn't blog about it. etc.

This is the definition of cultural visibility (relevance is more emotive, but harder to define). We don't see much of it. That's demographic. If Trump, Taylor Swift & Elon Musk or even people they know were reading Yahoo comments, the cultural cache would be more like Twitter's.

BTW, the thing I'm describing exists whether or not it maps to social or political demographics. Yahoo mail was irrelevant long before gmail actually passed them. Cool, in the know people were on gmail. Your auntie was on yahoo or hotmail.

[thesuitonym]

I'm not sure I understand the argument about Yahoo Mail being irrelevant. Yeah, the cool people were on Gmail, but they weren't separate, your auntie could still send a message to the cool people on Gmail or whatever other platform.

That's not to say I disagree with anything you said, because that cultural invisibility is a great point, I just don't understand how a mail service can be irrelevant.

[x86_64Ubuntu]

Are you really trying to tie the rise of Trump to boomers not being able to have their Yahoo comments?