For read-heavy content sites like Yahoo Answers, I wonder why they get shut down instead of getting compiled into pregenerated static HTML and hosted as read-only.
My bet would be that no management at Yahoo wanted to own that. It'd just be a slow down-and-to-the-right graph over time. There'd be absolutely no upside to having your name attached to the project, and any engineer who volunteered who be stuck maintaining it forever with no hope of promotion.
Sure, it's probably millions of dollars per year that they're throwing out by not keeping it passively online, so it'd be in the company's interest, but with apologies to Mitt Romney, corporations aren't people. If something isn't advantageous to at least one individual decision maker, it won't happen.
It likely has to do with a tech stack that's being retired or some other technologically-driven forcing function (authentication, security, etc).
Edit: my bootstrapped company was acquired by a much larger corporation and produced material EBITDA for 10 years, even in the year when it was shut down. Why was it shut down? Because it was written in PHP and the corporation was not going to support that tech stack anymore.
**
Analogy from the automotive world [0]:
> the $10m McLaren F1’s software can only run on a Compaq LTE 5280. The reason being that they run on an installed, bespoke CA card. This CA card is the interface that communicates between the laptop and the car. Of course, since the software was developed in 1992, it should be no surprise that it’s DOS based.
And, from what I'm seeing on the Answers home page, a lot of the popular content is rather time-sensitive (like questions about ongoing political controversies). A lot of traffic would drop off very quickly if the site went static.
> Sure, it's probably millions of dollars per year that they're throwing out
The reality of it is probably not, actually. Not when you consider the full cost of running it -- not just the engineers maintaining it, but the extra complexity of perhaps outdated technology (can make it harder for other teams to move forward, to migrate servers, etc.), and especially important the time spent by management in managing its continued existence.
And the management aspect is less about their salaries and more about what more profitable things they're not focusing on instead. You might say "well just hire another manager" but that manager has to be managed. Ultimately the CEO and board only have a finite amount of time to review projects and monitor performance, and otherwise even mildly profitable projects no longer become worth it when the cost of them being a distraction to management is taken into account.
> but with apologies to Mitt Romney, corporations aren't people
I agree corporations are not people but then why are they taxed instead of just the people? This whole country was founded on the principle of "no taxation without representation". Any people or organization being taxed will try to influence politics to improve their tax bill. There is no way around that.
You can have corporate taxes or you can have politics with no corporation meddling but you cannot and will never get both as people who own these corporations will always try to lobby politics one way or another in favor of the corporations.
Because if you don't do that, then rich people would just give their money to a corporation to "hold" for them. This already happens anyway, but regulations try to restrict it.
Eliminating corporate taxes would not change the fact that corporations want to tilt politics in their direction. There are other suggestions for ways to compensate for the differences between personal income and income to a corporation you own, but they always have to be designed to be cognizant of the way people will game the system.
The people that work at and own the corporation get representation, just like people that don’t. Why should being involved in a corporation give you more representation than others?
In the past, land (and slave) owners got more representation than others. All sorts of games can be played (and have been) to make sure the “right” people control the outcome of elections.
You could swap “taxes” for “regulations” in your last sentence and it’d be equally true - scrapping corporate taxed wouldn’t eliminate corporate lobbying.
True, the more overregulated an economy is, the more corrupt it will be. That's just a fact of life. Corollary, the less regulated countries but with a strong rule of law for the few regulations that do exist are the less corrupt worldwide. Note that it is easier to have strong and consistent application of the law (rule of law) when regulations are fewer as it's more simple to handle for both the legislator and corporations which increase the level of trust and lowers corruption.
Edit: I think it’s not worth anything positive for Yahoo to sell. I added the last two paragraphs.
I assume they sold Delicious and Tumblr because of outcries. I can’t recall if I am misremembering, but I believe Delicious was going to be shut down according to an early leaked slide show before being sold to the YouTube founders.
It’s probably not worth selling something for 7 figures. when your parent company is the hugely profitable Verizon, no less, if Yahoo was still an independent $2B company.
I assume the web app can’t be sold for too much when it has to get a new domain name and name.
Then either Yahoo has to untangle the code or only sell the database. The latter could easily become negative PR depending on what the new owner’s site is like. The former doesn’t seem worth it.
Eventually as others say. The wiki for it goes over the different selling points. Even with Pinboard it was and still is first frozen in place. I think soon it’ll be working again in some capacity.
And yeah the final sale to Pinboard was for literal 5 figure peanuts. While I think it was 1000x more when YouTube founders bought it.
I don't give a fuck about promotion. If Yahoo gave me a decent salary I'd maintain it forever. If I want more money I don't wait for promotions, I quit and find a better job. Jobs are just a way to funnel money into my investment portfolio which is the real money maker here.
> corporations aren't people. If something isn't advantageous to at least one individual decision maker, it won't happen.
By this logic, no collection of people can be considered "people". Indians aren't people, men aren't people, etc etc. As an Indian man, I find that idea absurd.
Unanimity isn't a prerequisite for personhood in the context of whether or not the rights extended to individuals disappear the moment those individuals act as an association/group. Corporations are people because they are groups of people.
You're absolutely right. No collection of people is a person. Indians are not a person and do not act uniformly in the interests of India. Are you suggesting that Indians are some sort of hive mind?
> Indians are not a person and do not act uniformly in the interests of India.
No, but they can act uniformly if they so choose. That's the entire point. The US Constitution doesn't ascribe group assignments, but the argument is that if people self associate into groups (non-profits, corporations, religions, etc) then the rights that extended to them as individuals also extend to them acting as a group.
In other words, I'm not suggesting that Indians are some sort of hive mind, but if one day all of the Indians in America decided to Neuralink themselves into some sort of a hive mind, the rights that extended to each one of them by the US Constitution also extend to them in their hive mind capacity.
> Corporations, unlike Indians and men, also have the legal status of "personhood"
This is purely a semantic argument. At least in America, Corporations aren't classified as "persons" in an official sense; rather the phrase "corporate personhood" refers to the ongoing legal debate over the extent to which rights traditionally associated with natural persons should also be afforded to corporations. In that regard, exactly like Indians and men, the rights traditionally associated with natural persons are also afforded to multiple persons acting as a group. This is just as true for a collection of Indians publishing speech about anti-Asian hate (or Diwali or Bollywood etc etc), just as it is true for a collection of men publishing speech about whatever it is they choose. Under that principle, the SCOTUS has found that Corporations enjoy the same rights to express themselves as an association.
Well, taking a step back, this is all a very very poor analogy to describe the mechanics behind why the Yahoo Answers team might choose not to maintain static web pages; bringing up Mitt Romney's arguments in that context is...perplexing, to say the least (and probably flame-bait).
But in the spirit of actually engaging with the comment, Mitt Romney's argument is centered around the debate around whether rights that are traditionally afforded to individuals by American law (i.e. the US Constitution) also extend to individuals acting in a group capacity. That is to say, if I got up on a soapbox and started preaching communism, can the US government prevent me from doing that? If you and I decided to create a group and find like-minded people and collectively use our resources to get up on a soapbox and started preaching communism, can the US government prevent us from doing that? The Supreme Court found that the answer to both of those questions is "No", and — importantly — that the answer to the latter question is "No" for the same reason that the answer to the former question is "No".
So taking another step back, arguing that "America is a person" doesn't make much sense in that context, because the argument is about whether "America" has collective rights under American law; it's like dividing by 0. But groups within the US are different; a group of communists talking about how dope they think Marxism is, in a legal sense, is exactly the same as McDonalds Inc talking about how dope burgers are, or Google Inc. talking about how dope search engines are...or even groups of Indians talking about how dope Shah Rukh Khan is. They're all protected by the First Amendment.
This would still be an ongoing product that would need integration into the current ad networks; security reviews; patches to the servers; OS upgrades; legal support (copyright, abuse, and right-to-be-forgotten claims); accessibility support; and probably a few other things I can't think of. It could be done, maybe for a profit, but how big a profit? My guess is any potential advocate inside Yahoo! has bigger fish to fry.
I think Yahoo Answers was highly indexed by Google in like 2010.
But for years now, I've never seen a Yahoo Answers link in my search results. You have things like Reddit now highly indexed which has far less silly answers and questions through actually having moderation.
I doubt its getting much traffic, and if it is, it's probably providing a bad look to the brand.
A “bad look” to the “Yahoo!” brand? Their “brand look” has been value destruction for more than 15 years, hitting their stride early with 2005’s acqui-trashing of upcomly, del.icio.us and Flickr.
I do remember often being frustrated when mostly useless Yahoo Answers content would appear at the top of Google search results. I never understood why it was ranked so highly. YA seemed like what Quora would be like if you were required to flunk a literacy test in order to participate.
At least Yahoo! Answers entries were short. Quora is basically the Y!A of today, but with essay-length responses that don't still don't answer the question.
Have you looked at Quora any time in the past 6 years? The answers may be grammatically correct, but the content is not much better than Yahoo Answers, and at least Yahoo Answers was funny.
In fact, the Google Search team has made changes to their algorithm over the years SPECIFICALLY to reduce crowdsourced answers sites from appearing in search results. It's a conscious decision.
A couple Yahoo product shutdowns supposedly happened because no one wanted to touch the code anymore. I’ve seen the same thing in much smaller product companies—the Elm app, the old Rails app after all the Ruby developers left, etc.
It remains a liability forever. You can never make it read-only because even 20 years from now someone will be sending your legal team take down requests because they don't agree with what 9 year old themselves wrote next to their real name...
Are there any real answers of value on there? I know there's plenty of hilarious questions like the classic "how is babby formed?" but I wouldn't ever consider Yahoo! Answers a legitimate source for anything.
