Remember when USENET allowed everyone to choose the platform with the look and feel they found most attractive and productive? This is why we have standard protocols. This is why we have clients and servers. This is why content and presentation should be strictly separated.

The attitude seems to be "it doesn't matter how many users we lose or alienate, were right and your wrong". Once upon a time marketing departments measured their success by number of new users gained. Nowadays UI departments seem to measure their success by number of users they lose.

This, and Agile. Here's one from the Yahoo feedback page:

"Previous / Next links missing while reading messages and topics is now fixed!"

In the non-Agile days, we'd have a functional spec. If it's a message board, being able to navigate from the previous/next message is probably core functionality. It doesn't pass QA, it doesn't ship unless it's, you know, at least as functional as the old version.

In the Agile days, for some reason unbeknownst to any end user, something that basic didn't make it into the MVP. The end user doesn't matter. Somewhere, some Agilistard decided "Meh, it's in the backlog, we'll get it in the next sprint. It can wait a week or two."

If you have no userbase, the Agile concept of ship (garbage) early and ship (garbage) often even before you really have an MVP actually makes some sense. If you have a 6-month runway of capital before you go belly-up and start over (oh, I'm sorry, "pivot"), there's no point in wasting another month to get it right.

But if you already have a userbase, the developer-centric attitude of leaving what, to users, is core functionality in the backlog while you release half-assed stuff that merely shows off how good you are with AJAX, or how quickly your UX people can change the design from one week to the next, doesn't work. It's bad for your customer base, it alienates them, and it eventually drives them to your competitors.

But what do I know? I think discussion boards were a mostly-solved problem with USENET. (And discussion systems like /.'s actually works pretty well, although moderating something at Yahoo-sized scale is a difficult proposition, and utterly impossible for something like USENET where the platform isn't controlled by the hosting company.) Acknowledging that a problem has been largely solved and could use a little facelift isn't agile enough anymore. Better throw the whole codebase out, and re-invent it from scratch, poorly, and use the userbase as guinea pigs. Who cares if the business actually improves its product, so long as everyone in the development chain gets to tick off boes like "learned new framework" "developed new UI" and "implemented agile release process in old stodgy company" on their CVs before they move on to their next jobs.

They are definitely NOT ignoring their users.

They are pandering to the emergence of the Idiot Elite.

Think of it, all those features could be argued as "power" features, which have been stripped out or dumbed down to pander to a growing populace of people too lazy or otherwise unable to figure out how to learn something a little more advanced than point and click.

I mean Microsoft pulled the start menu because ALL iOS and Android users are used to accessing apps by slapping a hairy knuckle against a grid these days, no fancy "tree" lists, categorizations or having to type to find something. Microsoft might have pissed off their power users, but guaranteed there are more people that actually like the Metro interface then the vocal minority that hate it. People are NOT complaining about the dumbed down simplicity of other Tablet OS'es these days.

So nerds, geeks, and dweebs do not rule the tech universe anymore, we are just along for the ride. We used to drive the market by wanting faster and better and more powerful in every generation, but eventually companies could not keep up and realized taking a large regressive step backwards made these products more accessible and desirable by the non-tech elite. Instead of upgrading to a new more powerful 16 core desktop, the idiot elite were dazzled by the simplicity of a tablet or phone with only a small fraction of the processing power and abandoned traditional computers, as they are with other services and games. People would rather fling a bird at pigs or harvest Smurfberries for 6 hours a day rather than exploring a world in an RPG or even getting out their aggressions in a state of the art FPS.

Every company today is crafting their services and products to pander to the Idiot Elite because they know they can profit more from them rather than trying to appease the power user. Consider the idea if an FPS like Crysis came out where you would have to buy your ammo with real world money. The GEEKS and NERDS would have revolted and the game would never be successful. However today the Idiot Elite are throwing millions of real world money at companies buying their fucking Smurfberries.

Companies are not ignoring their demographic, they are just beginning to realize how naive they are.

We lost, even Slashdot is slowly slipping into a social site where people would rather debate the qualities of cat breeds rather than ripping into the merits of a new CPU architecture.

No company makes a change to their service or product just to piss of customers, they do so because they are realizing there is a growing market of users that simply do not give a fuck!

What is (or was) nice about Yahoo Groups was the way it blended email lists and forums. Some people like to use it one way, some the other, and some use it both ways.

Change is hard for a lot of people.

That's a nice bromide... and it's easy to blame unspecified 'people' but it's bullshit in this case. Over the last few months, Yahoo! has been rolling out change after ill thought out change in page layout, UI, and functionality. They're trying to be 'hip' and 'modern' and failing miserably while alienating their existing userbase.
 

I use Yahoo Groups daily, and it really needs to incorporate modern features.

Like what? And more importantly why? The system worked, and worked well.

Totally with you.

I actually tried, but I can't think of any site revamp in the history of site revamps that I liked.

As someone above said, there seems to be this movement where UI (or in newspeak, "UX") experts are brought in with their doctrine of "right" and "wrong" interface design practices, and their egos which prevent them from re-evaluating their decisions when the entire user community tells them consistently and loudly that they don't like it.

When it's all over, a user either likes something or they don't. There will be an initial resistance to change, but once that's past if they are still complaining, regardless of whatever design laws you can use to justify your decision, it was wrong.