Farewell Yahoo Groups! Shutting down on December 15, 2020
Yahoo announced this week that it will shut down Yahoo Groups on December 15, 2020. Yahoo Group users are informed by Yahoo via email about the shutdown timeline.
Dear Yahoo Group Moderators and Members,
We launched Yahoo Groups 20 years ago to connect people around their shared interests. We helped our users navigate new towns, keep in touch with college friends, learn new skills, and most importantly, build connections they may have lost or never had in the first place. While we could not have been more proud of what we accomplished together, we are reaching out today with heavy hearts to let you know that we have decided to shut down Yahoo Groups on December 15, 2020.
Yahoo Groups has seen a steady decline in usage over the last several years. Over that same period we’ve witnessed unprecedented levels of engagement across our properties as customers seek out premium, trustworthy content. To that end, we must sometimes make difficult decisions regarding products that no longer fit our long-term strategy as we hone our focus on other areas of the business.
Beginning December 15, 2020 the Yahoo Groups website will shut down and members will no longer be able to send or receive emails from Yahoo Groups. We’ve compiled a comprehensive FAQ here that includes alternative providers and information on how this will impact your group content.
Thank you for helping us build one of the earliest digital communities — we’re proud and honored to have forged countless connections over the last 20 years and played a small part in helping build your communities.
Sincerely, The Yahoo Groups team
Yahoo disabled the creation of new groups already (on October 12, 2020), and will take the website offline on December 15, 2020. Users won't be able to send or receive new emails from Yahoo Groups anymore after the shutdown date.
According to Yahoo, the decision was made because of declining usage numbers of the service. Yahoo changed Yahoo Groups radically in the past years, and the decisions that were made played a role in the decline of users.
The last major change happened in 2019 when Yahoo decided to remove functionality and content from Yahoo Groups.
Yahoo suggests four different services for its remaining users: Facebook Groups, Nextdoor, Google Groups, and Groups.io. The last option, Groups.io, may be of interest to Yahoo Groups administrators as it supports the importing of members from Yahoo Groups.
Administrators may export the list of users via Group's Page > Management > Manage Members > Actions Menu > Export.
Yahoo, which is owned by Verizon Media, is just a shadow of its former self even though some services, Yahoo Mail and Finance, are still available.
Now You: Have you used Yahoo Groups in the past? What is your take on the shutdown?
I own several Yahoo groups. In October 2019 I received numerous announcements about content being deleted from the site, but just 3 days ago I found out about this closing when visiting the site.
Didn’t the heads of the Five Families (aka GAFAM) have a sit-down and decide that the Zuckerbergs would run the social rackets? And that they would all share their reporters, politicians, cops, prosecutors, and judges to enforce “the peace”? Smaller families like Yahoo! just have to go along, keep out of the way, and take whatever crumbs they can get.
;-) (but not really)
Nextdoor? Seriously?
Before I was thrown off ND, I was not aware of any group functionality. However, ND does have a lot of cliques where dumb people band together to downvote posts and complain about any posts that don’t meet their sensibilities.
Not a good experience there!
After all their data breaches I blocked Yahoo Mail and even now delete cookies immediately if I stumble onto a Yahoo site. Looks like the customer base Verizon bought may not be paying off any more.
I’ve never had a Yahoo account of any kind but do remember their entertaining TV ads 20 years or so ago and how, when I first went online in the early nineties found Yahoo, Excite, Alta Vista, etc., and didn’t have a clue what they were!
Not to worry, now we have Google.
/s
I haven’t used Yahoo in years. I went on there today to see how it is now and closed out immediately. The site now looks like a mobile app. Not designed for desktop viewers. There’s no comments on any of the articles. Cant’ see any discussions. Useless.
If the usage has declined, surely it’s not a major burden to keep it going?
@TimH
Perhaps it conflicts with their other assets. Also, policing social groups can be an expensive things to do, involving AI, various laws, potential PR issues, and more.
I’m sure Yahoo has good reason for this move, regardless to what us outsiders may think.
Adepts of the “Mozilla strategy” strike again. Let’s eff with a popular product for reasons that make very little sense to your users and then cry crocodile tears “with heavy hearts” about how your user base has shrunk considerably.
I mean no doubt the advent of many other social media platforms has been biting off chunks of the Yahoo Groups user base, but all the effing around with their services certainly hasn’t helped either.
Agreed, unfortunately.
I sincerely hope Mozilla make firefox relevant again.
Its the ONLY browser that an average IT bod can integrate stuff into and customise relatively easily.
Not much use if no-one uses it though.
@Ex Yahoo, Hotmail, but current Firefox user:
“[M]ake firefox relevant again.”
I’m ordering a bunch of MFRA hats as we speak! ;-)
I’ve never used Yahoo Groups! myself, never had a Yahoo! account and ever since the GDPR I totally ban access to that company given it systematically redirects to its [guce.yahoo.com] consent page, page of its own which cannot be skipped easily. Generally speaking I’m surprised the company managed to survive after its past financial and leadership torments. Not for me.
> Generally speaking I’m surprised the company managed to survive after its past financial and leadership torments
Of course, it was sold to Verizon.
Actually, it (the consent page) can be skipped *very* easily.
Just click on the ‘X.’
You’re done.
@Steve, not to mention Yahoo’s compliance to high standards of tracking:
[https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=yahoo.com]
Have a look, and check other domains as well with this ‘Blacklight’ … stunning.
@Steve R, by “skipped” I meant automatically bypassed, not closable. Of course it’s closable.
From what I know Yahoo! was most relevant in USA and Japan, elsewhere not so much. I remember it was popular and it even had games and some stuff like Yahoo! Avatars, which I remember, but then it went on a steady decline.
On a few occasions I wanted to open some article on Yahoo! News only to be greeted by an overlay to accept some terms before I can read the article and since there was no way to bypass the overlay by deleting elements from the page, I opted to look for my article elsewhere.
I also had a couple of Yahoo! Mail accounts that I remember very well, as well as their passwords, but each time I try to log in, it tells me the information is wrong and no such account is found.
I think it’s stuff like this that make people stop using their services.
Same happened for me in Hotmail – I had about 3-4 e-mail accounts that were connected as a recovery method to the last one and at one point Microsoft decided to prompt me to change my password like very 2 months or so and not allowing me to use previous passwords, so one time I failed to input my password 3 times and it locked my account, it told me it had sent an e-mail to my recovery account, but as I haven’t logged in into the other accounts in months or years, they were inaccessible due to MS Hotmail both trying to force me to change my passwords and lock my accounts for being inactive at the same time, so in this chain of events, I lost like 3-4 Hotmail accounts, with no way to recover them, I even tried to recover them a couple of times, each time it was denied…
After that experience (happened in 2017), I found about Proton Mail and started using it, had only one account, never been prompted to change my password, never been locked out of my account have had the best experience.
This is how services should be – not piss poor trash like Yahoo! or Hotmail.
@Allwynd:
I have a similar story about Hotmail. Back in the very early 2000s, I had to take care of a seriously ill relative close to ’round the clock for a prolonged stretch of time. I literally didn’t have the time (not to mention the energy or inclination) to sign into my Hotmail account for five or six weeks. And when I finally did sign in, my account was *gone*. It turns out that at that time Microsoft had a policy of deleting Hotmail accounts after 30 days of inactivity.
I’m not the only one it happened to. I recall reading about a travel writer who essentially posted all of her notes and write-ups in Hotmail emails to herself. She’d taken a working trip and done a bunch of these, and then she took a *real* vacation somewhere where there wasn’t any Internet … and she stayed there for more than 30 days. Oops! I’d been using Outlook Express so I had a local store of everything up to my last sign-in, but she was totally *screwed.* She was LIVID, and rightfully so.
As for Yahoo Groups, I’m pretty sure I belonged to one for a while, but it wasn’t terribly active, and I was even *less* active than most other members were. I’m not even sure it still exists. I haven’t received any notifications for *ages*.
What a kaflian experience!