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Comment by ssreeniv | Hacker News Reader

Inspite of making so many mistakes, Yahoo is still one of the top 10 most visited sites. What is working for them?

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

Here's an answer based on anecdotal experience; I know maybe a dozen people who have a Yahoo email address and use Yahoo as their browser home page. All of them are of my parents' generation. I think the answer to "what is working" is that Yahoo was able to acquire millions of users back in the late 90's when Yahoo was the only game in town, and many of these users are baby boomers who get very frustrated with new technology, who are familiar with the Yahoo UI due to nearly two decades of interacting with it, and who view switching to Gmail or whatever else as a hassle that is just not worth the frustration of learning how to use another platform.

I still use Yahoo Mail because GMail was changing too often and I had got tired from hunting buttons. Also you can select to see only unread emails in Yahoo. Also, if you send an HTML email to an Yahoo email address you can put the CSS in a <style> tag and Yahoo servers will deal with it nicely and the CSS will work when you read the email on Yahoo's website.

But all this Yahoo is dying nonsense did bring some changes. They modified the UI code and now, sometimes you select an email but you can't click any actions (delete etc.) because the app is confused about the state in which it is. It happent less recently.

Then they pulled Yahoo Messenger, which is how I was notified of new emails, while not having ready the mobile app.

Thankfully the mobile app is really good and I have my other account on it too.

And the ads... they are good. As oposed to google that will follow me with the same ad for weeks even if I already made my purchase or maybe it was just a curiosity. With Yahoo it's more like "here are some things people your age look at".

Honest question/not trolling: How often do you style personal/non-business/marketing emails?

By writting CSS directly, never. But then you would think all the other newer, "better" companies would have this little detail fixed already. But they don't. And it becomes hugely important as soon as you open your own online shop and you want to send a proper HTML email.

I read Yahoo! Finance dayly.

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