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Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

"Sadly this probably means 3 things are going to happen in the next 6 months"

(Genuine question, not snark). Why "sadly"? Companies, even technical companies, get obsolescent and die all the time. Maybe it is just Yahoo's time to go.

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I can't speak for chollida1, but for me as an "older millennial" (28) Yahoo was how I came to discover the internet.

Between the chats, instant messenger, search before Google, multiplayer games online with strangers (albeit simple ones like chess and poker), and Geocities it was my first taste of the types of things I do online to this day. I think it's okay to mourn a bit for how we remember the company.

Yes, those yahoo chess ladder rooms burned through a ton of dial up hours at my house.

As an even older millennial (35), I have very fond memories of Yahoo.

I remember receiving a two-disk copy of Netscape Navigator from a local ISP at a computer show in early 1995 and setting the home-page immediately to Yahoo. At the time I remember seeing hard copies of "The Internet Yellow Pages" at the local Barnes and Noble, but most search was through Yahoo or Alta Vista. Back then AV had several fewer orders of magnitude web pages to crawl and SEO/spam hadn't yet taken off, but even still the AV results weren't always useful. Without page rank or a decent sorting algorithm, I remember often going through pages of results.

Yahoo had it all: games, continuously updated stock quotes (at a time when I would look up share prices in the morning's paper, priced to the nearest eighth of a dollar), weather, news, and hand picked results from around the web. It was all I was previously getting from CompuServe/Prodigy, but at no cost.

But now I haven't visited Yahoo in years. It's like when your favorite teenage band breaks up. You're a little sad, but you've moved on. The fond memories are for life.

Edited to add: we all used a home page back then because tabs hadn't yet been invented, meaning the restore previously opened tabs option that we all use today also didn't exist. One's home page had a much greater importance back then.

Fwiw, stocks were all priced in 8ths. A few remain that way today. But the newspaper quotes are still a quaint memory regardless.

I'm a young millennial and even though Google was more or less my first search engine/portal (I used Alta Vista until my 1st grade teacher showed me Google around '99) I also have fond memories of Yahoo!.

I won a Final Four bracket against high school classmates on the site's fantasy sports page and knowing nothing about college basketball. I made $150 from that.

Even though they clearly made strategic mistakes and Mayer's revival may have been too little too late it's still sad when an "old-school" tech firm goes under, especially one that touched so many lives.

1st grade teacher, 1999. God, I'm old.

Well said.

This is my Nokia heartbreak all over again

> As an even older millennial (35)...

cough

Dude, give up the skinny jeans :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X

"Generation X, commonly abbreviated to Gen X, is the generation born after the Western Post–World War II baby boom. Demographers and commentators use birth dates ranging from the early 1960s to the early 1980s."

There's no hard generational boundaries. For what it's worth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials

"Millennials are the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates when the generation starts and end; most researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s."

Someone 35 is on the bubble.

I have variously seen the upper boundary for Gen X as 1976, 1979, and 1982. Having been born toward the end of 1980 and comparing myself to those born in 1970 and 1990 (squarely in the middle of their respective generations), I find myself having far more in common with the latter. Hence why I consider myself a millennial.

But never will I give up the skinny jeans!

The Strauss & Howe definition, which I find most useful for cultural purposes, puts the line between '81 and '82.

With that said, it's been my observation that people born within a few years of the line in each direction -- as far as '77 to '88 -- tend to share the same values and have characteristics of both Millenials and Xers (born in '84 here, and I'll gladly apply that description to myself). I've also seen people, particularly those in the S&H community, use the term "Generation Y" specifically to refer to this cusp and not to Millennials as a whole.

Gen-X stereotypes tend to be more true for people born '76 and earlier, and Millennial stereotypes tend to be more true for people born '89 and later.

There are probably other things that play into the stereotypes but being born '89 and later maps pretty well to never really knowing a pre-Web and pre-Mobile world. A somewhat primitive version of it in their tween/early teen years to be sure but an online world nonetheless.

dude give up the pedantry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials

"Millennials (also known as the Millennial Generation[1] or Generation Y) are the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates when the generation starts and ends; most researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from the early 1980s to the early 2000s."

Soft clustering does a much better job of classifying people into generations.

You can't be a 35 year old millennial, sport. Generation Y for you.

Wikipedia claims Generation Y = Millenials... sport

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials

Hey, it's ok, you can both be wrong :)

1979/80 would both put you in Gen X as a birth year ('61-'81, although Harvard for some reason thinks '64-'84 - either way, bad luck, Coupland novel it is).

Thank god Harvard has taken a stand

I'm 41 -- I have always detested yahoo's clutterly, ugly start page.

I gave up Yahoo mail years ago.

The only thing I ever went to glance at was finance.yahoo.com -- because it seemed to be the literally only page that you could gleen info from yahoo in a split second...

I remember using AltaVista and finding it really useful. I had a mail account with them. They shut it down.

I miss discovering new search engines (Lycos, Lycos FTP Search, Dogpile, this new one with a stupid named called Google). I didn't use Yahoo! heavily at that time but I did use Geocities pages alot (before they were bought).

Where are the rainbow horizontal rulers now, eh? And marquee tags? They should make a comeback.

Agree with the others re: our first experiences on the internet.

But even now Yahoo is still hanging on to some valuable things we're likely to lose in this change. I'm still a heavy user of Flickr for example - and though many others have tried, it's still IMO the best photography community out there (sorry 500px).

It's been a perennial money-loser for Yahoo, kept around because what self-respecting tech giant doesn't have a photo hosting service? I fear with this spinoff we're seeing the end days for that product.

I'll agree with flickr having a lot of good photography, but did they actually fix the community?

When I used it, all I remember is that 90% of comments were sparkling banners saying "YOUR PHOTO HAS BEEN AWARTED BEST FLICKR OCEAN SUNSET AWARD MAY 2010! CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR GROUP! JOIN JOIN JOIN!" to the point where it interfered with anyone trying to have an actual conversation.

Which was a shame because outside of the enormous volume of spam they had a pretty good thing going.

I just tired of most of the community aspect of flickr aside from folks I already knew IRL. I found a lot of groupie-ism and, as you note, group stuff that was at least spam-ish. As with other things about flickr, I guess I'm not really sure what the "right" flickr looks like and how you achieve that at profitable scale. And, to be honest, I've never had a lot of interest in community photo meetings and so forth locally either.

True, I doubt it's possible to have much of a community at the scale that Flickr is aiming for. You can do it with a niche little photography site, but anything operating at mass-market sizes will eventually turn into a lot of people spamming groups and internet jokes at each other because that sort of behavior feeds on itself and gets you more active users to generate money from.

I hadn't checked it out recently, but it looks like they're still doing fine as far as having a ton of great photos posted. As long as the "community" aspects don't bug you, maybe it's a winning strategy?

OTOH I have no idea if they're profitable or not.

>I hadn't checked it out recently, but it looks like they're still doing fine as far as having a ton of great photos posted. As long as the "community" aspects don't bug you, maybe it's a winning strategy?

It's fashionable to bash on flickr because it's "languished" and, one redesign aside, hasn't moved a whole lot in a long time. I've certainly taken casual swipes at them myself.

However, the truth is that--while I can imagine some features I'd like--it works pretty well and has a lot of great photography. At the end of the day, it's entirely possible that I wouldn't like it if they were constantly taking the site in new directions because social or mobile or big data or whatever the current hype is.

Absolutely. There's a huge trend of websites redesigning and shuffling around just for the sake of doing it, and in the rare cases where you can still access older interfaces (I'm thinking of GMail here) it's totally arguable that the old ones are better. If you have a service that works well, staying the same is nothing to be ashamed of.

I haven't been putting any of my photography online for a couple of years now (aside from sharing to friends on Facebook), but the thought had cross my mind recently. It's a tossup between hosting them on my own site or going somewhere else where it can be "social" and more importantly, more broadly visible.

For me, flickr works because I can drag photos that I've processed in Lightroom to the jfriedl publishing service, hit publish, and they go up to flickr where I can share them or people can just stumble across them. I have no doubt the discoverability is better than if I put them on my own site and I do indeed have people contacting me from time to time to use a photo for something or other. (And doubtless, many uses that I don't know about.)

It's not a big thing but the very modest price, the low friction, and contributing to the commons in however small a way work for me.

Left for the same reasons - it was interferring with my photography. Around the same time, other services like Smugmug and Zenfolio got better (I think Smugmug is now a little more up to date than ZF's look, but not originally).

Flickr decided for a long time to not prioritize the best photo display possible and limited photo size and wouldn't offer things like black backgrounds.

And now I may get an infinite less number views, I don't have to deal with the comments, and photography is no longer associated with gamification (when do I post this for the most views to hit explore, etc).

Flickr has a bit of a "look" to what is popular, and while I'm big on good photo processing and the history of the dark room, what makes it today is often too processed, too HDR, and so on, and playing the "game" is not something I'm interested in.

In the early days of Flickr, people DID look more at all the photos in groups they posted to, and that was pretty great.

Getting more people into photography is great though - just shouldn't be about numbers.

Yeah, there was a lot of that, and the bigger groups are still like that to some degree.

But (much like Reddit) the smaller communities were a lot more sane. And (much like Reddit) it was easy to create new communities - groups with memberships in the dozens or hundreds were infinitely better and actually useful for getting feedback and sharing your work with people who gave a damn.

So, the mass groups were pretty shit, but there is a thriving mass of smaller communities there that are quite pleasant and useful. (Again, much like Reddit!) - and competing services largely haven't cloned this or offered an alternative.

500px doesn't do small niche communities - there isn't really a concept of a "community" besides "the whole userbase", and as a result commentary on photos there is exactly like the big Flickr groups - all noise.

Smugmug targets specifically portfolio hosting and presentation, which it does very well, but it has minimal social components.

The only service - oddly enough - that seems to have attracted small photography communities is Google+. Weird.

That's true, but just like when people die—even when it's their time—it can be sad. I haven't used Yahoo in months, but like my sibling comment, it was a large part of introducing me to the web and what was possible.

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