Yahoo Changes User Profiles, To Massive Outrage 255
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."
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
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.
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].
Way to piss your userbase Yahoo (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Five Nines, please, on my free service. (Score:2, Insightful)
Well said. I have had several discussions with associates and friends who are by now utterly dependent on Facebook. The latter has always bothered me, since (among other reasons) there are so many cases of people getting their fingers burnt through no fault of their own.
If a service is important to me, I expect to have to maintain it by means of something a bit more binding than a click-through agreement that cedes all control to the administrator.
The $64K question is: why did they do it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Five Nines, please, on my free service. (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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What I want to know... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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
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.
Re:Way to piss your userbase Yahoo (Score:2, Insightful)
Considering that most profiles are just small amounts of user input, we figured that the users could always re-enter it. Yeah, it was a crappy thing to do, but it was the right thing to do. (And I personally spent my own time sending lost poems, URLs and pictures back to users who requested them. I'm not a heartless bastard, that title was reserved for upper management)
From your explanation, you warned them before the transition, so they can save their information and enter it back.
Yahoo didn't do this. Sending a notification to the users costs nothing.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
fighting spam, perhaps? (Score:2, Insightful)
ok, with that in mind, who's to say that the staff at yahoo saw the thousands (millions?) of spam profiles with links to porn/malware sites and decided "you know what, fuck it, we can just start with a clean slate. The users who aren't bots can always get their data back anyway."
You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette, you know?
Re:Yahoo still matters? (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:Yahoo still matters? (Score:1, Insightful)
Welcome to the exciting world of time zones, many people still think it's saturday, these are of course american idiots who wouldn't know what a GMT was if you told them and can't read a 24 hour clock to save their lives. It's not their fault that the US doesn't uses a single international standard, their country is screwed up.
Look, dude ... you're posting in a public forum on an American web site, and all you're doing is reaffirming all the bad impressions we have about people from other countries. Don't you understand that it goes both ways? People go on and on and on about "Ugly Americans" and how uncouth and uncivilized we are, and then go and make crass comments that, really, just go to show unpleasant they are. You're a classic example of that behavior. Absolutely classic. I have news for you: every society on Earth is screwed up on more ways than one. That, my impolite friend, is human nature. If what you're really saying is that, despite our imperfections, we managed to achieve a degree of cultural influence, economic and military success that your nation never even dreamed of ... well, that's just sour grapes on your part. Grow up.
Stupid git.
Re:Five Nines, please, on my free service. (Score:1, Insightful)
...
Yahoo please die already, noone has liked you since '96.
People said stuff like that to Apple and Atari as well :)
Re:Yahoo still matters? (Score:2, Insightful)
Welcome to the exciting world of time zones, many people still think it's saturday, these are of course american idiots who wouldn't know what a GMT was if you told them and can't read a 24 hour clock to save their lives. It's not their fault that the US doesn't uses a single international standard, their country is screwed up.
I'm not aware of any country that requires its citizens to refer to Greenwich when stating what day it is, regardless of their own time zone. I kind of thought not having to do that was one of the good points of time zones, e.g. so that people in Japan wouldn't have to change their dates at 9 AM every morning. What time zone are you? Do you always check GMT before posting on Internet forums?
Re:Some time ago... (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.
Re:The $64K question is: why did they do it? (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.
Re:FIRST POST (Score:1, Insightful)
It's not about not knowing what used to be in your profile, it's about having to rewrite whatever information was in there from scratch. Or requesting the data from Customer Care (also very fun).
Bottom line is that it's extra work for absolutely no reason.
Re:FIRST POST (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.
You're the product, not the customer (Score:3, Insightful)
> its about competition. Other free services would never do this. And though we don't pay
> them, they get money from us.
If you don't pay them they don't get money from you. They may get money from people you buy stuff from, but that money stops being yours when you spend it. Try to understand that to these advertising agencies you are the product, not the customer. Nothing wrong with that as long as you remember that the services they give you are just promotional gimmicks. They have no obligation, legal or ethical, to deliver anything at all to you.
Re:That's what you get.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ha-ha! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stallman (Score:3, Insightful)
Then run for the hills! Abandon your Slashdot account immediately because it's an evil web service that you can't control! Go run your own web server for your own IMAP email, or abandon IMAP entirely and use POP! Look, contrary to your condescending attitude, I understand Stallman's argument perfectly. And like plenty of other people [arstechnica.com], I happen to find Stallman's intentions good, but his conclusions so far from practical that he comes off sounding vaguely kooky.
The bottom line is it isn't in any web service operator's best interest from a business or a reputation standpoint to suddenly deny their customers access to the service and/or their data. Otherwise you get Slashdot stories like this one. On top of that, there are plenty of folks out there whose data is better in the hands of, say, GMail than their ISP provided POP email account because there are plenty of folks out there who don't know the first thing about keeping regular backups. GMail does this for them.
I, like most people, just don't buy Stallman's argument. For him to be correct, something apocalyptic would have to happen. And even if being that paranoid was legitimate, Stallman's solution of confining your computing to computers you own is so inconvenient that most people would sooner prefer to just lose some data. Even the folks unable to comprehend regular backups tend to store the really important data in multiple places anyway, such as in the cloud, in a text file somewhere, and on some good old fashioned paper too.
So while you're sticking your nose in the air waiting for that apocalyptic scenario to happen so you can join Stallman and the < 1% who agree with him in saying "I told you so!" so you can feel smarter than everyone, the rest of the world is going to carry on using web services. Because whatever negligible risks of data loss and even privacy invasion that exist are well worth the convenience.