The Yahoo Incompetence

It is clear to me now, after having been a member of Yahoo for several years, that this company is at it's very core utterly incompetent. It must have an incompetent board of executives, incompetent programmers, incompetent community managers, incompetent developers etc etc.
During the years of my Yahoo membership, I have witnessed how each decision made to "improve" the service, has all ended up making everything worse.
From the 2005 wipeout of user-generated chatrooms, to the shere mind-boggling amateurism and uselessness of the 2009 "new and improved profiles", Yahoo has not made a single good move in atleast 5 years.

The chatrooms, which originally was one of the main attractions that brought a userbase to Yahoo, are now so rampant and infested with automated spam "bots", that they are all but unusable to serious chatters. This is a shame, because there are no real alternatives to Yahoo Chat out there. And Chat is an important and delightfully different way of communication with people from all over the world, in a time where everything is drowning in self-promoting 15 minutes of fame type social sites, like Twitter and Facebook.

Yahoo has decided it also wants to be a social site. And this they have gone about with all the enthusiasm and vigor of the incompetent. The result of which are the "new and improved" Yahoo profiles, where all the information you have written about yourself has been crammed into a 3 inches wide column on the right side of the screen, your blog entries reduced to links and the rest of the page dedicated to "updates". Which means that all the information that matters is unreadable, and everything that has to do with "abbey connected to melissa_daniels" and "abbey updated her latest news", gets the front and center and 90% of all the page space. Why? Personally I have turned off the updates section on my profile, which in return means that my profile is essentially one big blank page.

You may ask if I can't just move the modules around, but no! In their ingenuity, Yahoo has managed to create the possibly least userfriendly profile on the internet. Modules can't be moved around, you can't customize even a single pixel, and most Yahoo users - far the most - can't even get beyond figuring out how to make the profile public, which is like figuring out how to write the guiding system on a NASA Mars probe. Worse actually, because it doesn't actually work at all. No matter what you do, no matter how much you use the informationless HELP - where the FAQ's include all the questions you don't need to ask and not the ones that you do, like "why can't anyone see my profile, eventhough I have done every single thing your tutorial tells me to do?" - no matter how much you try and try again, you will always lose on Yahoo, because Yahoo is, quite frankly, crap.

And it could be so good! If they only listened to their users. Which they did for a short, strange while, on their Yahoo Profiles Blog and Yahoo Messenger Blog. However, this is over now. On the Yahoo Profiles Blog, they simply decided to silence all criticism (of which there was bountiful plenty), by TAKING THE COMMENTS OFFLINE! I kid you not! It's not like they shut down the comments section. No, it's still there. You can go in, read the blog post advertizing how amazing their "new and improved" profiles are, and observe that each blog written by some Yahoo minion, has a number of comments. But if you click the comments link, you get "Sorry, the page you requested was not found". On all blog comments on all blog entries, dating back to the first one. Thousands of comments, suggestions and critiques by Yahoo users, wiped out in one glorious stroke.
Even worse is the Yahoo Messenger Blog, where the almighty Product Manager, Sarah Bacon, actively deletes critical comments. You can try this yourself. Go to the blog, write what you think Yahoo has done wrong and what you think they should do right, and watch how your comment magically disappears over night. Write anything remotely critical, and you will be censored.

This is a really dangerous path to take for any web based company. They will end up completely alienating the remaining userbase, like yours truly, and turning themselves into the evil villains in this issue. The end result could be the last and final exodus of active users on Yahoo (they lost about 85% of active chatters in 2005, when they wiped user generated chatrooms from the service, and more have left since, due to the "improvements" and lack thereof in the years since).

I have witnessed this company walking down the path of implosion and self destruction, at a faster and faster pace. In all fairness, it is quite a feat that they have not gone bankrupt yet. They know how to get the sponsors I assume. They know how to get advertisements. But they sure as all heck, have no clue how to maintain a decent service or how to nurture a userbase. And what is a company without clients? What is Yahoo without active users? Without the communities that once made Yahoo a living and vibrant place to visit and spend time?

What is Yahoo now, after the last 5 years of incompetent decisions? It is nothing but a glorified billboard. It has no purpose. The chatrooms are dead and silent. It's like a post apocalyptic wasteland, where all life is gone and all that remains are the machines (the spam bots) still grinding away for no one.