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A genuine question for you. What exactly does Yahoo do? When I think of Google, I think of search. With Amazon, an ecommerce giant for my shopping needs comes t

A genuine question for you. What exactly does Yahoo do? When I think of Google, I think of search. With Amazon, an ecommerce giant for my shopping needs comes to mind. But with Yahoo, nothing comes to mind except all the spams I got when I had their email...

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
Actually, their spam filtering is quite good these days.
porsupah 11y ago
For me, they're: (1) the owner of Flickr, an acquisition they've tried to futz around with, but haven't actually managed to damage too much yet. (True, the site design's become much more heavyweight, but that's a general web design issue) Interestingly, whilst they tried to go ad-only, removing "Pro" accounts, they later reinstated them - but with an oddly tone-deaf press release that trumpeted that account level's availability again, and that rates wouldn't go up for two years. Fair enough, except Pro had been $25/yr, and they quietly noted they'd be $50/yr in the future. Is ad-only revenue that strong to consider dispelling paid accounts? (2) The original curated web index. Fiendishly difficult to scale, absolutely, but while it lasted, it was remarkably useful. Could such still work? It'd be a tremendous challenge, but, Wikipedia might suggest so - it's not as if Wikipedia is free of dead/changed links, but the footnote links do indeed tend to be useful. Yet, as I recall, their finances are/were quite robust - we may well simply not be Yahoo's audience.
- rodgerd 11y ago
  > Could such still work? Effectively it would competing with Reddit, HN, Metafilter, and similar sites where the owners have an army of people curating the web for them, for free. Which makes it a hard ask. Obviously there's a demand because Reddit, HN, MF, etc, exist, but enough to make money off of?
  - visakanv 11y ago
    Actually IMHO the curation of Reddit and HN is pretty bad. Just my $0.02. My problem is that it's focused on what's new and relevant. The web sorely needs (IMHO again) really well curated paths that are organized from first principles rather than novelty. But I'm not an expert, just a random guy with an opinion.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago

Actually, their spam filtering is quite good these days.

porsupah 11y ago

For me, they're: (1) the owner of Flickr, an acquisition they've tried to futz around with, but haven't actually managed to damage too much yet. (True, the site design's become much more heavyweight, but that's a general web design issue) Interestingly, whilst they tried to go ad-only, removing "Pro" accounts, they later reinstated them - but with an oddly tone-deaf press release that trumpeted that account level's availability again, and that rates wouldn't go up for two years. Fair enough, except Pro had been $25/yr, and they quietly noted they'd be $50/yr in the future. Is ad-only revenue that strong to consider dispelling paid accounts? (2) The original curated web index. Fiendishly difficult to scale, absolutely, but while it lasted, it was remarkably useful. Could such still work? It'd be a tremendous challenge, but, Wikipedia might suggest so - it's not as if Wikipedia is free of dead/changed links, but the footnote links do indeed tend to be useful. Yet, as I recall, their finances are/were quite robust - we may well simply not be Yahoo's audience.

rodgerd 11y ago
> Could such still work? Effectively it would competing with Reddit, HN, Metafilter, and similar sites where the owners have an army of people curating the web for them, for free. Which makes it a hard ask. Obviously there's a demand because Reddit, HN, MF, etc, exist, but enough to make money off of?
- visakanv 11y ago
  Actually IMHO the curation of Reddit and HN is pretty bad. Just my $0.02. My problem is that it's focused on what's new and relevant. The web sorely needs (IMHO again) really well curated paths that are organized from first principles rather than novelty. But I'm not an expert, just a random guy with an opinion.