I don’t mean to sound like a jerk or anything, but I have to wonder, at least in jest, if Marissa Mayer is secretly still working for Google in an attempt to destroy Yahoo!. And I say that only because since she has taken over, Yahoo! has totally ruined its home page, and apparently changed little to nothing else. I was initially excited when I heard Marissa Mayer was taking over at Yahoo!, because I heard she was very smart, and I thought she’d make changes for the better. But all I’ve noticed thus far is that the home page is too big, it takes far too long to load before you can do anything with it, nothing is organized anymore so it’s impossible to find things easily (in the articles, that is), and all the crap that was wrong with Yahoo! before is still firmly entrenched.
I really thought fixing Yahoo! might be pretty easy, as their problems were pretty apparent to most users. Most of their offerings were vapid partisan articles riddled with typos and grammatical errors, all of which was lambasted by readers in the comments section. (I know I’m hardly one to talk about such things, but still; this blog is written for fun and is unpaid, whereas the Yahoo! writers get paid and are supposed to be professionals.) I think most of us really came for the scathing comments making fun of the amateurish level of “journalism” on display. But today they’ve apparently disallowed comments on everything. (I don’t see any today.) And without the comments section, and with the annoying new home page, I am looking elsewhere for content. (I generally looked for better content elsewhere anyway, but I always came to Yahoo! too out of habit and a sense of loyalty.)
Nothing personal, Marissa, but it seems to me that the least you could do is to fix the obvious problems first. I have a few brief suggestions: 1.) Hire a copy editor to fix all the glaring errors in the writing. 2.) Hire better writers, or make a deal with leading newspapers and/or columnists to include their articles on Yahoo!’s home page, and hire good people to decide who you’re using. 3.) Have a more balanced political spectrum, with only opinion pieces having an obviously discernable ideological bias (too much news these days is agenda journalism that reads like propaganda rather than news). 4.) Have some humor pieces and cartoons, just for the bored people who want a quick amusement in a brief break at work. 5.) Provide a list of good blogs/websites in a variety of areas for people to check out, helping people to find other fun stuff on the Internet (this would be especially helpful for people like me who are middle aged and not as good at finding the hot new stuff without a bit of directing. It seems to me that many of Yahoo!’s users are people like me who come back out of habit because they don’t really know where else to go. So keep the good stuff, improve the bad stuff, provide suggestions for other fun places, and provide your own fun stuff to attract new web surfers.). If you make these changes, which should be easy for an expert like you, I think Yahoo! would be resurgent; but keep it like this, and people really might start leaving in droves. (I’m only trying to help.)
P.S.: No offense, Yahoo!, I hope. I’m only writing this to try to help because I feel a loyalty to Yahoo! after years of habitual use. But you guys need to fix the problems and help people branch out (who need help finding more online fun). And if you provided lists of fun blog posts and stuff, people really might come to Yahoo! just to find out what to go look at elsewhere on the Internet, as it’s not always easy to find such stuff. But as it is, I find myself using Google now for stuff I used to use Yahoo! for, hence the joke about Marissa Mayer being a double-agent.
