When Yahoo Reigned Supreme | Hacker News Reader

When Yahoo Reigned Supreme

priceonomics.com

38 pointsghosh21 comments

I'm old enough to remember gopher, then mosaic, then netscape navigator, and a web that had only a few dozen sites. Then there was altavista and metacrawler, and of course yahoo. In our (physics) department of 20 people back in the 90s and 00s, no-one ever used yahoo: its 'directory' listing of websites never sat well with any of us, and we never used it: it just felt wrong and cumbersome. In fact the longer yahoo stayed around the more we joked about it. I am still astonished yahoo is still around now, I always felt it was doomed to failure back in the 90s.

I wonder if we will be reading this site in 10 years (or its successor) and see a title "When Facebook Reigned Supreme" about how a monolithic social network was seen as a gateway to everything having to do with your friends and interests.

Facebook can exploit the network effect. Yahoo, not so much. However, whenever Facebook will be dethroned, it will be because it has become "infrastructure" people take for granted.

Is it just me, or does the graph of VC investment look like fading ripples?

Yeah Facebook is able to leverage peer pressure in a big way, yahoo had email but with facebook messenger if you cancel out you lose access to communication with a lot of people. Not even google was able to make a dent in facebook, google plus turned into a broken joke.

AOL/AIM used to be Huge. Now not so much.

It didn't help that when the buzz and hype was greatest for Google Plus they... didn't let people join Google Plus without a difficult-to-obtain invite. By the time they cut that out nobody gave a shit anymore.

Turns out Cartman's "you can't come" technique doesn't work so well IRL.

It worked for GMail though.

Yeah, it did get some buzz going iirc. Gmail doesn't rely on network effects tho.

Facebook will probably get the antitrust treatment, just like other pre-internet infrastructure like oil and telephone did

what would kill facebook is p2p util to store digitals (photos, links, status, etc) and share it with others.

Something like Twitter, then?

If only that would happen. It just seems corporations even outside of Facebook feel they have to lock people down as much as possible. It's annoying as hell. Like I've noticed there's very few apps on Android or iOS where you can just type in an Internet stream URL like you can with Screamer Radio on Windows (I don't know if there's a Mac equivalent). And one of those apps, TuneIn Radio, is becoming more locked down. Like I've had a hell of a time adding DRIVE Radio to it a week ago. This is just for internet radio of all things. What possible reason could there be to lock down such a thing? What real profit can they squeeze out of approved internet radio stations? Sorry for the digression into this pet peeve of mine but it seems it's all tied to the whole Facebook being the Internet concept. It's like they can't deal with just being a service or an app anymore. Gotta control the whole process from inputs to outputs and/or consumption. Can't have it your way. "No sir, that's not an approved fork for your meal, you must use our Brand X Ultra DeLuxe fork.." Bleh!

This article is from 2014. A few things have changed since then. For example, Google now does offer ads in the Play Store: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/07/launching-search-ads-on-...

People seem to forget that overture (bought by yahoo) was the first to do SEA in auction model like google does now

I miss the old Yahoo TV commercials. Those were fun.

I never understood the main selling point of Yahoo.

When I first used it, it was a great resource because there really weren't search engines and so directory sites were the way to find the "interesting" pages for a topic. At the time, Yahoo! was run on a server called akebono.stanford.edu.

I don't think Yahoo had much to offer after the web moved from directories to search, they mostly because a content provider that monetized their high level of traffic (yahoo was a big destination on the web for a lot of people).

Back in the day, they were the easiest way to get people to find your site, and for other people to find your site. Things were so disconnected, web "rings" were a viable strategy to navigate sites with shared interest.

Also, their games and other sub sites were a pretty good draw as far as getting eyeballs to their site.

Yahoo was a gateway to doing more or less everything you could do on the Internet. With a single account and familiar user experience. You could play games, email, read the news, buy and sell things (stores, auctions, shopping), chat, search, plan travel, share files, have a home page, send money, have a pet (do you remember Yahoo! Mash? neither does anyone else) or find a pet, find somewhere to live, get internet service, listen to music / watch music videos, call your mom, etc, etc, etc.

In 2004 when I went through employee orientation, the company had a clear goal: be a the top 3 online site in as many categories as possible. When I left in 2011, nobody knew what they wanted to do. Now they don't even know how to put a ! after their name!

2004? Interesting. I thought their prime time was earlier.

I started using the Web in 2001 and didn't have much to do with Yahoo.

On the other hand, we had something like Yahoo in German, called "web.de" they were pretty big back then. So I got my infos from Google, my mails from "web.de" and the rest from MySpace haha.

Anyway, Yahoo seemed old school even when I started back then.

it's still a pretty big deal in japan, but it's unclear how much of that is a result of the ymobile cat.

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