The writing's been on the wall for a while: this was first announced last year, then postponed, and the online UI was already shut down in February 2020.
Completely boneheaded move in that it removes the last reason many people like myself would ever even stumble into a Yahoo site, but then again, Yahoo Groups's SEO visibility is also near-zero these days, and I figure the beancounters at Yahoo computed that this is worth less than the ever-present cost/risk of policing random contributions. (Which is also why file attachments were the first to go.)
For anybody looking for a replacement, I can recommend groups.io (no affiliation), which also has a pretty smooth migration tool and has a completely adequate free "Basic" tier: https://groups.io/
I can second this recommendation. Our Quaker Meeting was on Yahoo Groups for 12 years, but we also saw the clear signs that it was going to shut down, so migrated to groups.io a few months ago. Generally it's been quite smooth. It took a while for the moderators to figure out the reply policy settings we needed, but now it's pretty nicely tuned. (I was only tangentially involved, I'm on the committee but am responsible for a different part of communications, so in part this was a test of how well it works for users who aren't PhD computer scientists).
Yahoo is such a weird company in that it does so much yet it doesn't have the mindshare. Maybe it's a completely different generation still using it, I don't know.
Until they killed the comments section a few months ago, yahoo news (comments) seemed in the same league as a reddit or whatnot for a lot of news. There would be hundreds or thousands of posts on most daily news items.
Yahoo slipped into a segment of invisible people. The volume is there, but the people are middle aged late adopters... very far from the cultural centre of gravity. They're affected by the conversation elsewhere but don't affect it.
It's like that random singer-songwriter no one seems to have heard about in years, but still packs stadiums.
The comments were filled with additional information and there was a community. I understand why they got rid of them due to creeping toxicity, but they didn't even try to improve it before killing it.
Yahoo's business model is incoherent, so it's hard to make a coherent case for or against killing that comment section. Maybe there's no commercial value in owning a lower tier (in terms of cultural equity) discussion board.
Trying to reform an online community is a bastard of a task. What's the upside?
Anyway, its notable that a "social media" of that scale got killed, and most people who know about these things barely noticed. Journalists are on twitter. Their fiends are on fb. They check reddit, even 4chan to see what the fringes are saying. I doubt most journalists are even aware when their own article "blows up on Yahoo News." It's almost embarrassing.
I suspect that fb/zuck have an eye on this kind of thing though. They are massive, and mass is very valuable in the modern economy. But they have been migrating down the rungs of cultural equity... and Zuck knows this is dangerous.
FB started at harvard, then Ivey leagues, then colleges, then the world. We've seen this pattern multiple times. Get the important people, then get everyone. Tinder, Quora and others did this perfectly.
But... beware the "Yahoo effect." Move too low down the social ladder (for lack of a better term) and you become irrelevant. This effect killed friendster too, if you remember that far back.
Cool people have been receding on FB since day 1, and eventually it'll catch up to them. They'll have most of the people, but none of the influential people.
It's amazingly difficult to get away from. For those of us who had Yahoo email accounts, trying to get people to stop emailing them is a slow drawn out process. My wife and I switched to Gmail accounts at least 5 years ago. We still get friends and relatives sending to our Yahoo accounts. This, despite multiple requests to stop.
People seem to either reply all on old messages whenever they want to contact us or copy/paste email addresses from old messages, like invitations for Christmas parties, when they contact us. Either way we can't get away from Yahoo.
The other issue is companies using email addresses as user names. Just a few days ago, I went through Yelp to order a food delivery fulfilled by Grubhub. The order confirmation listed an old Yahoo account as the contact email. This was courtesy of Yelp using the Yahoo account as my login. Yelp provides a way to add an email address and make it the primary. Not all businesses do.
If I could snap my fingers and be done with Yahoo, I'd do it. I started to move us from it when Marissa Meyer was still CEO.
I shed my Yahoo mail 15 years ago. It was easier back then, especially since I was moving to Gmail, which was miles ahead of Yahoo's interface at the time. I don't even remember when I stopped checking my Yahoo account, nor when it was automatically disabled because I didn't log in for too long.
About two years ago I started moving away from Gmail, and that was a lot harder. I kept checking but eventually had to just set up a vacation responder. I still check it about once every couple months, but to truly move away from an email address, you have to really stop using it.
I maintain a Yahoo.com email account but I'm not sure why. I have Gmail pick up the mail using POP and that's where at least 90% of the emails in my spam folder come from.
I guess I worry about there being something out there that I used long ago and want to retrieve. And they started recycling email addresses: https://celeretech.com/blog/yahoo-begins-recycling-e-mail-ac... So there was the fear that somebody else would take over your old address.
That was a long time ago (2010) and they reversed direction but there's nothing going on with Yahoo that makes you think they won't do it again.
It is I think, my mom still uses it and still has a yahoo email address. I'm guessing there's a lot of older users for whom yahoo was good enough and is still good enough given their usage.
I watched a friend load their yahoo webmail and it had multiple auto-playing video ads (I don’t think there was sound but their audio may have been muted). I feel dirty just mentioning it.
I've always used it as my homepage / page to check the news. It was an unpretentious news aggregator with a comments section where you could check to get the details which the articles neglected to mention.
Lately they've shut down the comments section most of the news is delivered via opinion pieces from HuffPost, Daily Best, The Independent, The Guardian. A great shame... not sure what a good replacement would be.
Interestingly, Yahoo Japan remains a dominant force in that particular market. "Yahoo! Japan's web portal is the most visited website in Japan, and its internet services are mostly dominant in the country." [1]. They are the number 2 search engine in terms of marketshare with almost 20% [2] . I kinda think of their unique national presence as a quasi representation of Google + Facebook + Ebay experiences all-in-one.
If I remember correctly, Groups.io was started (~2010s?) by the founder of Onelist (~mid 1990s) which merged with eGroups (~2000) and was subsequently purchased by Yahoo and became Yahoo Groups.
It just goes to show that Yahoo could have innovated to improve the product but was unable to. The original founder understood the needs and how things have changed (or not) over the past 25 years.
Could you explain more about this "Basic" free tier? When I go to https://groups.io/static/pricing, I see a free 30-day account, after which it becomes $20/month. You're not the first person who has said there's a free plan at groups.io but I don't seem able to get one myself. Have their plans changed recently?
Completely boneheaded move in that it removes the last reason many people like myself would ever even stumble into a Yahoo site, but then again, Yahoo Groups's SEO visibility is also near-zero these days, and I figure the beancounters at Yahoo computed that this is worth less than the ever-present cost/risk of policing random contributions. (Which is also why file attachments were the first to go.)
For anybody looking for a replacement, I can recommend groups.io (no affiliation), which also has a pretty smooth migration tool and has a completely adequate free "Basic" tier: https://groups.io/