Yahoo announces plans to kill off Games, Livetext, Boss, and more regional sites | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo announces plans to kill off Games, Livetext, Boss, and more regional sites

venturebeat.com

46 pointshornbaker38 comments

I've got some nostalgia for Yahoo Games. Here's an anecdote I've posted elsewhere:

I was on a phone interview to be a software engineer for a web game company in ~2013. The interview went very well. At the end I asked what I'd be working on, and they said blackjack.

I said, "Didn't Yahoo solve that problem in the 90s?"

I didn't get a call back.

I particularly enjoyed this tetris-style game called Yahoo! Towers, which had powerups and a great multiplayer. I would bug my friends to learn to play it so we could all play it together. It was great.

Edit: Just found a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwdLR-9bky4

I played another game like this when I was younger, it was multi player tetris with powerups, but not this.

It was so enjoyable to play, was hoping your link would be it but alas I don't think so. I remember it being a game client as well.

Edit: found it, Tetrinet!

When I was working my first job as a tech at a weather forecasting firm, I started playing around with Perl for the first time. I gradually automated most of the tasks in my job, after which I got to play Yahoo Games for 2 hours a day. There's not really much else to do at 5 AM, but at least I got to enjoy the virtue of my laziness.

Goodbye Yahoo Games, I'll always remember you.

Anyone complaining when google shuts down bum projects need to remember this. Yahoo let divisions fester along leaching resources from the company with no clear path to anything. When google cuts a project, even if you super seriously love it, they prevent an announcement like this.

Wait for "Yahoo shopping closing" news and see how big news it ll be on HN :)

One extreme does not absolve the other extreme.

Not sure I understand your point. Shutting things down early prevents them from being shut down later?

Shutting things down early prevents a drain on company resources and preventing future layoffs. . . hopefully

Without analyzing any of the specific cuts, it is a brave move to cut divisions as well as people. Too often companies just say "Everyone bears their share of the 15% cuts" without changing priorities. It's rare to say, "Let's stop doing certain things" and make the cuts that way.

An aside, but I wonder how much of that behavior, particularly in the 2008ish period, has contributed to wages stagnating.

If you are getting paid peanuts, and not getting raises because "you should be lucky to have a job" and then you get forced to do even more work, and they don't hire more people because you're gritting your teeth and taking it, wage stagnation seems a pretty obvious outcome.

Wages generally stagnate in bad economies as a result of what you've said.

Even when I haven't been on the market, I've been paid the best when multiple firms are potentially competing for my services. When I'm in the market, having 2 offers in hand increases the value of both.

And wages don't exactly catch up enough to make up the gap in good economies.

I wish there were better wage information out there for people. Glassdoor is just a start, but there's such an advantage to be had by companies maintaining the information asymmetry that I doubt it will change anytime soon.

Indeed. I was listening to a podcast this morning [0] on the topic. They highlight that salaries should be public, with clear paths to more money. I'm not sure if that would work, but your point is valid.

Glassdoor is ok, but not great because it generally only contains base salaries, and doesn't have enough data on smaller companies. I know that investment banking and consulting salaries are dramatically under-represented on it.

H1-B filing databases are another data point, but suffer the same limitations.

The only sure thing is to test the market. If you get multiple offers, eventually they will close in on your true worth. It's a very delicate game to play, because you have to make sure people know you are interested without appearing disingenuous.

[0] https://hbr.org/ideacast/2016/03/your-coworkers-should-know-...

Weird--HN didn't give me the option to reply directly to this before so I assumed it was the thread limit.

In any event, here's what I wrote a level up: -------

I found it ironic that you cited the investment banking and legal industries not being well represented on Glassdoor. I'm actually not sure where they get the data from, but my brother is an ibanker, and I have several friends and family members that are lawyers. Salaries across banks and firms seem to be VERY well known across the industry at all levels, even for entry-level roles, and seem to be openly discussed.

I wonder what sort of unique dynamics led to that vs. other industries and how we can capture some of it to level the playing field. It definitely leads to a more level playing field for employees since they know they are either signing up for better pay or something else, and it forces companies to compete on pay and/or some other aspect, and then make that publicly known.

I know when my lawyer friend goes to get a new lawyer job he has to submit transcripts and pay proof from at least his last two jobs. Then they offer current job pay + x.

As a dev I have never had to submit past wages. Never felt the need to lie about past wages, but I know of people who have. Little bit different for sure.

Unfortunately due to HN's thread reply limit I can't respond directly to mathattack, but I wanted to note that I found it ironic that you cited the investment banking and legal industries not being well represented on Glassdoor.

I'm actually not sure where they get the data from, but my brother is an ibanker, and I have several friends and family members that are lawyers. Salaries across big banks and firms seem to be VERY well known across the industry at all levels. I wonder what sort of unique dynamics led to that vs. other industries and how we can capture some of it.

Oh, Yahoo hasn't done any intelligent cuts like that. The last cuts were the same stupid 15% across the board, save a couple of orgs.

End of an era regarding Yahoo Games. I remember many long hours playing Yahoo Chess and Yahoo Pool when I was in school.

I think Facebook was to blame for it's loss in popularity, then it became cell phone Apps. Those who didn't adapt their web based games into the mobile market missed out. Flappy Bird got really popular, but there was always that flash game about the helicopter that was more or less very similar.

Oh no, Games lost its traction long before that. I went on blogging, going to forum, playing flash games, GTA, myspace, youtube, etc. Pool was really fun. Games allows you to talk to players and to me that was a game changer back then. simple interface and very stable gaming experience.

I did, too. I thought Yahoo Chess was shut down long ago?

In any case, it was long surpassed by much better alternatives like ICC and Chess.com.

Yup, Yahoo Pool was the best multiplayer billiards game for about a decade until Miniclip Pool came out.

They had a word game that was good to. H

Yahoo Games was one of the best. I used to play games there when I was in elementary school (I am the 90s kid). Pool, poker, etc. But when I clicked on Yahoo Games the catalog reminds me of the hundreds of smartphone games in Android / iOS store that I don't want to play. What happened to the simple pool game graphic? Chess game?

What else? Those Flash games out there!

Limb amputation will not save the body I'm afraid. Interesting that they can't find buyers at any price for those resources.

They could. But it wouldn't look good in a headline that reads: "Yahoo sold off Games division for $200,000" Cause I wouldn't imagine someone paying more than that.

Yahoo! Store has been rebranded to https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/ecommerce which I assume means it is for sale or will be, but I haven't read any news to that effect.

AABACO SMALL BUSINESS. That's just perfect branding.

All aboard the SpinCo!

See http://yahoosmallbusiness.tumblr.com/post/109624934574/yahoo... - the deal/transaction that fell through.

Will the Boss shutdown affect Duck Duck Go?

I sure hope they took their investment money to build their own crawler - there's really no excuse not to. Much cheaper smaller companies with smaller budgets have written one.

The fact that I have no idea what any of these are probably explains their kill off. Sad times now and sadder times coming for Yahoo.

I did, they were active before Facebook had games, then when cell phone Apps dominated the market it all changed. Microsoft has similar services, if they still do. Microsoft shifted their focus completely towards developers recently and they will benefit from it, not sure what I would do if I were Yahoo other than close down anything not worth it's dollar.

Right. I knew about Yahoo BOSS, but since Yahoo just resells Bing, it was kind of pointless for Yahoo to still have a search API. Bing has a similar API, so if you need this, there's a migration path.[1]

[1] http://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/bing/search

Yahoo games seems like an odd choice. I think that lies of older people frequent that.

My parents for example spend lots of time after checking their Yahoo Email playing mahjong and various other games on there.

Now I'll get asked where they can turn to next to get their games fix!

This is one of the key requests made by advocate investors last year, although they wanted much deeper pruning. It seems like a good plan to me. I'm curious what's next.

Any idea what will happen to the games? From the posts here it seems it would be a good idea to archive them somehow

"Bye Marissa" is the new "Bye Felicia."

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