Slashdot Log In
Yahoo Changes User Profiles, To Massive Outrage
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Oct 18, 2008 11:20 PM
from the why'd-you-go-and-do-that dept.
from the why'd-you-go-and-do-that dept.
Wiseleo writes "Yahoo decided to massively screw up their entire userbase by changing all user profiles to blank. No warning, no automated way to get data back, and other unwanted changes. The blog has such choice quotes as 'We know this has been a rough transition for some of you and, and are committed to helping you use, understand, and (hopefully) enjoy your new profile,' and, 'We also know lots of you worked hard on your old profiles and want your data. If you feel like you're missing data, we've saved a copy of your old profile (and alias) and our Customer Care team can retrieve this information. You won't, however, be able to revert back to your old profile format, but you will be able to get any data that you think is missing. To do this, please go here to contact Customer Care.' There were 850 comments posted, all negative, on the first day. There are hundreds more today. There is even more outrage on the Yahoo Messenger blog."
Related Stories
[+]
iGoogle Users Irate About Portal's Changes 321 comments
bhhenry sends in an InformationWeek report on a recent unannounced change in the iGoogle portal. Quoting: "Google insists that its revised iGoogle personalized home page generates better 'happiness metrics' than the old design, but a vocal group of users isn't happy about the changes." The recent change introduces what Google refers to as "canvas view," which the Official Google Blog claims "... makes iGoogle a more useful homepage and a better platform for developers." Unlike the last major change made to Gmail, there is no option to revert to the old version of iGoogle. iGoogle users are reporting that widgets and themes are broken, Gmail attachments don't work, and valuable screen space is wasted. The Personalizing Google section of Google Groups is full of thousands of complaints about this sudden and unannounced change. Many posters have have stated that they are using the Canadian or UK version of iGoogle or even moving to NetVibes.com to get their preferred layout back. It seems that Google and Yahoo are moving in lockstep in springing forced changes that users hate.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
FIRST POST (Score:4, Insightful)
And nothing of value was lost.
Seriously, what could be in your profile that you don't know about yourself?
Mal-2
Re:FIRST POST (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:FIRST POST (Score:5, Funny)
Myself? Oh, you mean my made-up character. let's see. I'm a 15-year-old bi-sexual girl with a 38DD, I remember that, but um, what um, I can't find the picture, and I can't remember what activities I was supposed to be into, other than group orgies... sh***....
Oh well, guess I'll just create a new one.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:FIRST POST (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly someone who has never been married.
"No, dear, you're wrong. We've had that portable DVD player for ages and you just never noticed. I told you I was buying it. I showed you it when I got it."
That is an actual conversation I had with my wife recently. Only thing is I WASN'T LYING! I genuinely DID tell her I was buying it, and DID show it to her, AND have used it multiple times in front of her. The other day she finds the box. "Why do we have a portable DVD player box?"
*facepalm*
Parent
That's what you get.... (Score:4, Funny)
for insisting on 38DD blondes. There is a fixed brain to boob ratio and it can't be violated.
Parent
Re:That's what you get.... (Score:5, Funny)
BULLSHIT. What an outrightedly sexist and utterly wrong thing to say. I dare you to even attempt to prove it. Simply put, I know you can't, no more than I can prove that men with large penises all have IQs less than a hundred.
Parent
Re:That's what you get.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
What changed? (Score:5, Funny)
I wasn't even aware that people actually USED their Yahoo profiles.
I just logged in for the first time in a couple of months and did not see much change, other than increased clutter on the screens getting me to yahoo mail.
What changed? Am I supposed to be outraged too? Inquiring minds want to know!
Parent
Re:What changed? (Score:5, Informative)
The only thing that seems to have visibly changed is http://profiles.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com] - this died a quiet death years ago anyway, nobody actually used it for anything serious. It was always nothing more than a place to stick a couple of pictures and a few fields for the odd comment or two. http://360.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com] is far more popular and provides services akin to actual 'social networking' - it makes for a better 'profile' anyway.
Either way this new system is a step up from what it used to be, though yes, a tad annoying in the sense that they just blanked everything out, but I probably would have done the same, It was just an incoherent disjointed mess. The user experience was horrid right from the beginning.
Parent
Re:What changed? (Score:5, Informative)
Possibly bad form to reply to myself, but meh... I went through the process of restarting one of my ancient profiles just now - I suspect Yahoo have made a few changes since the story hit the tubes. Not everything is blanked out, in fact most details were resurrected just fine. All my pictures and contacts are still there, though I had to go through a couple of simple mouse clicks to make it happen.
The only people who will be really annoyed by this are those that are bitching about the loss of all their split personalities (aliases) - well not exactly, they can keep the multiple names, just that Yahoo is going to point back to a single profile and link all the aliases to that one profile. This will clean up all the crazies who roll out a new persona with every new boy/girlfriend, bad hair day, full moon, EMO issue, and so on and so forth.
Probably just a housekeeping strategy internally at yahoo - it'd save them a few bucks on hard drive space at the very least. I guess for anyone who really wants a bunch of different profiles, they can always create another account. They are free after all.
Parent
Re:What changed? (Score:5, Funny)
all the crazies who roll out a new persona with every new boy/girlfriend,
check
bad hair day,
check
full moon,
check
EMO issue,
check
Hey, you guys get your own stalker. I've found mine already.
Parent
Re:What changed? (Score:5, Funny)
850 angry comments can't be wrong. You are currently feeling rage.
Parent
Re:What changed? (Score:5, Funny)
yeah but it was only three people making those posts.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But you will note that they very carefully did not remove the tens of millions of accounts that no one has used in seven years. Wouldn't want the paying customers (that's not you, "user") to guess that their marketing statistics are inflated.
Let's move on now... (Score:5, Funny)
Can we get Facebook and MySpace wiped clean, too?
Re:Let's move on now... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Let's move on now... (Score:5, Funny)
You'd need to nuke it from orbit.. It's the only way to be sure.
Parent
Five Nines, please, on my free service. (Score:4, Insightful)
When hotmail was new, before Microsoft owned it, there was genuine discussion over how appropriate it would be to trust a service that you don't pay for.
Seems like for the last ten years or so, that's not even been on the table. It's just one more service that people expect, and expect to run with utter reliability
I know these companies make a buck from advertising revenue, or whatever. But YOU don't pay them a penny, unless you want to. Most people don't want to.
If you're complaining because the least part of a large service that you have been using for free, perhaps since the dawn of the commerical internet, has made an unexpected change... well, really, you need to have a long think about whether or not that makes you an ass.
Even if it doesn't, relying on a free service to keep ANY of your data probably makes you one.
Re:Five Nines, please, on my free service. (Score:5, Insightful)
its about competition. Other free services would never do this. And though we don't pay them, they get money from us. So we can complain. That said. Yahoo please die already, noone has liked you since '96.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
People said stuff like that to Apple and Atari as well :)
So you're saying Yahoo has a 50% chance to pull through?
Re:Five Nines, please, on my free service. (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if it doesn't, relying on a free service to keep ANY of your data probably makes you one.
I wouldn't have any more faith in the paid ones [arstechnica.com].
Parent
Re:Five Nines, please, on my free service. (Score:5, Informative)
While it is true that many users are using the services for free, Yahoo also has a significant number of paying users, if I recall correctly; I see nothing to suggest that these changes didn't affect them as well.
Unfortunately, many companies with online services that have free and paid versions tend to forget about the paying customers when planning these sorts of things.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see why you brush off the ads so quickly. Users use the system in exchange for being exposed to ads, and exposing recipients to ads. If it weren't for those users, Yahoo wouldn't be able to sell ads.
Even if it doesn't, relying on a free service to keep ANY of your data probably makes you one.
There is a big difference between being an ass and being stupid or careless.
Re:Five Nines, please, on my free service. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're complaining because the least part of a large service that you have been using for free, perhaps since the dawn of the commerical internet, has made an unexpected change... well, really, you need to have a long think about whether or not that makes you an ass. Even if it doesn't, relying on a free service to keep ANY of your data probably makes you one.
I disagree. It doesn't make you an ass, so much as it makes you an idiot.
Parent
Re:Five Nines, please, on my free service. (Score:5, Funny)
Yahoo loses money on every customer, but they make up for it in volume!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Some friends and I were discussing general utility questions and the issue of what we'd be willing to pay for Google (the search engine) and Gmail (the email service) if we had to.
The consensus opinion was $50/year for search, $20/year for email. Take that for what you will: it's a water cooler discussion.
I have a similar feeling. I'd be willing to go higher, though, considering how useful Google Docs has become. I'd happily pay something like $50 a year for exactly the service I have now (including ads) with GMail just for the guarantee that if they had to shut down, they'd bank the money to keep things operational so I'd get like a month's notice to transition. Going dark is fine. Going dark suddenly, that's what scares me.
What I want to know... (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't say I'm happy about this - among other things, I had to reset my profile with absolutely no notice whatsoever, and all of my online friends are going to have to do the same. But, I'm not paying any money for this service - I don't even use the official Yahoo client (I use Trillian instead) - so it is theirs to do, no matter how annoying it is.
However, I want to know something. When you look at the profile screen, an important word stands out in one of the corners - "BETA." "Beta" means that the service is still being tested, and isn't ready for full release. So, what I want to know is why the entire user base of Yahoo was put onto a profile system that hasn't moved out of beta testing yet. There is no way that is good practice.
In all seriousness, this should have been finished and declared done before a change like this was made.
Re:What I want to know... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:What I want to know... (Score:5, Funny)
Beta isn't a trend, it's a lifestyle!
Parent
Ya who? (Score:5, Funny)
Are they not dead yet? Next you'll tell me AOL is still around.
The $64K question is: why did they do it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
To obliterate over a decade of cruft accumulation?
Most Yahoo profiles were created by spammers. I bet a year from now, anything that hasn't been updated gets deleted entirely, freeing up a lot of the username space.
Stallman (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this just the type of thing that Stallman was referring to not long ago? Granted, the particular details of this instance are not THAT alarming (people's profiles) however, it certainly goes to show . . .
I agreed with him then, and will certainly keep it in mind.
Moe
Why so hard to fix? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't get it. If they still have the data, why is it so hard for them to write up a script to fix the mistake?
It shouldn't take one of their programmers more than a few hours to whip up, and would save them all this headache.
I wonder if there's more behind this "accident" than we're seeing.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It wasn't an accident. From the article, it looks like they fundamentally changed their profile/account structure (note I'm not a yahoo user, this is simply from RTFA).
It seems to "migrate" existing data to the new structure is not clear-cut and linear. In theory, they could have built some user facing tools to allow the users to choose different data migration paths, although this would invariably involve a ton of additional complexity, which is probably why they opted not to do it.
I suspect this is bein
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't get it. If they still have the data, why is it so hard for them to write up a script to fix the mistake?
Because they insist that it wasn't a mistake and, generally, they wanted people's profiles clean. Now if this is true or not remains to be seen: they could be covering up their asses by saying it was intentional, because a company that accidentally kills or blocks your data would receive event less trust than a company that does it intentionally. So practically by this announcement they could be choosing the lesser of the two evils.
I know why (Score:5, Interesting)
There used to be clever hacks in the old Yahoo Profiles to modify your profile to do things like play MIDI files and change the background and run Javascripts via a series of exploits in the way the Yahoo data forms worked.
Yahoo wants to get rid of the exploits by wiping clean every profile after it fixes the exploits. Some of the exploits stole passwords and other data and some even installed malware.
I don't mind having a blank profile, I am not really notable anyway. I am a pirate ninja and just love to blend into the background so nobody can notice me as I turn invisible. :)
How to run an internet business. (Score:3, Insightful)
20 PEOPLE eventually flock to COMPANY and use their services
30 TIME passes
40 COMPANY bosses get itchy and need to scratch, read: they feel they need to be 'innovative' and/or they feel they aren't making enough money
50 CHANGES happen to site which affects users ability to conduct their business (buying/selling/communicating etc.)
60 PEOPLE are fucked off with CHANGES and complain bitterly
70 COMPANY ignores PEOPLE
80 GOTO 30
taste of cloud computing (Score:5, Interesting)
And this is a perfect example of why I will NEVER use 'cloud computing'. My data on my hardware that I have complete control of, thank you.
I get what you are saying.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, how much different is a
Sadly, Not Surprising (Score:3, Informative)
I worked at Yahoo for five years. I have no idea who's left (most folks I knew have also since left), but this is a clear sign of losing focus on the user. First there was the draconian booting of everyone off the old version of My Yahoo! [wdr1.com] & now this.
Why do people get to make decisions like this & keep their jobs?
You can still get to your old profile (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yahoo still matters? (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, couldn't this space on /. be taken up by something that matters on the intarweb?
According to Alexa, Yahoo! is the most popular site on the internet [alexa.com]. I'd say that that's more than enough to make a website matter, personally.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yahoo is popular yes, but profiles.yahoo.com, not so much.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yahoo still matters? (Score:5, Funny)
Last I checked, although you can customize your yahoo page, you can't remove the F***ING HOROSCOPE! That actively pisses me off every time I set eyes on the page.
You're just saying that because you are an Aquarius -- so eccentric and passionately unwilling to fit in with everyone else.
Parent
Re:Yahoo still matters? (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, it's sunday.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah. When I drop my daughter off for school at 8:00 am local time, I always say "good afternoon" to the other parents. The idiots think I'm crazy.
Re:Google changed iGoogle only a few days ago... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody is complaining? Everybody in the Relevant Google Groups are complaining! http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Web_Search_Help-Personalizing/topics [google.com]
Most of the trackbacks for the Google Blog post announcing the change were negative, although Googleblog admins have since removed those trackbacks.
Most people dislike the wasted space of having the tabs to the left. People Also dislike the removal of the plus feature in rss feed gadgets, since the replacement (the first 20 words or so of the text of each article) is not nearly as nice looking or functional. (This change has since been reverted.) Lastly, many people are upset that gadgets can no longer be collapsed and expanded with just a single click.
Parent