Are News Message Boards Ever Coming Back to Yahoo??

Question

Are News Message Boards Ever Coming Back to Yahoo??

Answer 1

Since Yahoo is a Wall-Street-driven company where pennies per share are everything, you can be certain that the message boards were not making money.  If the boards were turning a profit, you can be sure Yahoo would have at least kept them going while working on the supposed new system.  This talk about protecting users from trolls is an insult to our intelligence.

Probably the click-through rates on ads were very low, and advertisers didn't like having their ads appear next to controversial (and sometimes lunatic) statements of opinion.  Running the message boards would cost money, in the form of hardware, power, and bandwidth.  If Yahoo was not making money, they were in effect providing the boards as a public service.  And it was not a public service they wanted to provide.

Much speculation has centered on politics -- the fact that Yahoo message boards were used to express a lot of opinions not allowed in the mainstream media, including very strident criticism of George Bush, Israel, and the Iraq war.  From my observations, war-related articles drew the most comment, and posts ran 20-1 against the war.  Only once did I notice significant trolling, and the ignore feature makes it easy to get rid of them.

The current hiatus in message boards operations is very likely an experiment, to see how important the message boards were in generating traffic for Yahoo News as a whole.  If Yahoo News page views and revenue stay the same without the draw of the message boards, you can expect that the message boards will never return in anything close to their original form.  If, on the other hand, Yahoo News revenue drops off noticeably, there will be an urgency to bring the message boards back in some form that satisfies their fans.

If the message boards do come back, it will be a delicate balance, since the purpose of the re-design will be to suppress certain types of opinion.  Yahoo already has a reputation for pro-establishment attitudes and coziness with governments.  It's hard to make money if you are perceived as the new Pravda.