Yahoo! is a Mess

How is Babby Formed (flash, w/ sound) is just another another ROFL internet meme and I too have rolled on the floor with it. On second thought, it saddened me as yet another example of how Yahoo! is filled with garbage. Yahoo! is an interesting portal in that A) it's huge, often touted as the "most visited" site on the net B) most of the people who visit it are registered with it. You can tell (B) because something like 60% of its traffic is people using Yahoo! Webmail, and you have to have a Yahoo! account for that.

So why is this an interesting combo? Well, Yahoo! has all the ingredients of an online community, but the sheer size and all-inclusiveness of their registered base has a way of overwhelming any interactive or social space. It reminds me of a piece I snipped together a long time ago when Yahoo! News had comment threads on every story. Yahoo! Answers is the darling of the Yahoo! network now and sees phenomenal usage, but it's also plainly and visibly garbagy all over the place.

In the Something Awful video the voice actors simply read aloud a Yahoo! Answers question and someone's response to it. It's instantly hilarious that anyone thought to post these halting thoughts on the internet, and tragically hilarious that anyone thought them in the first place.

I don't blame Yahoo!. They're just casting a reflection of the illiterate masses. But I think it's a good case of "too much democracy." Or perhaps the lesson is that traditional media needs the Internet to bring it a breath of fresh air by involving more people and particularly more ordinary people, but involving everyone is not an improvement. It's worse.

Y!A is now swarmed with copycat postings. It's not easy to discern the original, if it's still up. I don't know what's sadder: that people have spammed up the service with copycat postings, or that some people continue to respond to them with genuine, helpful answers. Between the clueless, the malicious, and the inchoate, it's pretty difficult to see Yahoo! as anything but a high-tech dungheap.

I'm not sure what the solution is but they need to implement network-wide identity, filtering, and reputation systems fast. If they have them they don't work. Yahoo! has the traffic and the technology to be the "well lighted place" of the internet that so many have tried to be (AOL, MSN, even Prodigy) but I think they're more concerned with generating pageviews and ad impressions overall to buoy their battered stock price. It's a shame when your stock price suffers and you have to focus 110% on making those quarterly growth numbers sparkle for the assholes on Wall Street.