When an old site announces a shutdown, here’s what generally happens: People flood the site trying to save their old content, it draws a bunch of attention, people reminisce, archivists attempt to download the data to preserve it, and engineers at that startup or giant company attempt to foil their efforts. In the end, we lose a resource as a digital community that we once relied on, and we do so in a way that cuts off any attempt to recollect it or understand it in its given context after the fact. More often than not, the company most responsible for this is Yahoo, which has killed or severely damaged dozens of services since it was founded a quarter-century ago. They killed GeoCities, a key artifact of user-generated content. Now, they’re killing Yahoo! Groups. This needs to stop. Today’s Tedium poses an idea for preservation that could make more sense than shutting down platforms entirely.
Why Yahoo! Groups reflects a long history of bad corporate citizenship
Recently, I wrote something on Twitter that might have been a little harsh given a certain viewpoint, but comes from a place of general frustration with a company that has generally not done the right thing by history.
Long story short: I called Yahoo! “on balance, a destructive force for the internet,” and noted that the company has destroyed significant amounts of our digital heritage throughout its history.
My issue with Yahoo! and its corporate successor Verizon is effectively that the company has bought and acquired numerous services over its quarter-century of existence, only to let many of them wither away—in many cases, to shut them down entirely, most infamously in the case of Geocities, a decade-ago shutdown that was effectively the digital equivalent of burning down an ancient library.
But it’s not the only one. Tools like Yahoo! Games and Yahoo! Messenger have met their maker over the years thanks to shifting corporate decision-making. Some of these sites were very well-known and memorable. Others were quickly forgotten.
The reputation for corporate sunsetting was so prominent that when the company bought Tumblr in 2013, it made a promise that it would not “screw it up.” Which it then proceeded to do.
Verizon has been slightly better at this: Instead of simply shutting down sites, it’s attempted to sell them to owners that actually make sense for the tools, as it did in the case of Tumblr and Flickr.