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Dropped by the Yahoo Finance message boards this evening to scan through comments. The Yahoo Message Boards have been around in the same form for nearly as long as Yahoo, and for the past several weeks Yahoo has been testing a new format, which I find hard to read. Fortunately, there was a link to return to the original version, and I think it’s been popular.

Sometime over the weekend, all Yahoo Finance message boards have been upgraded to the new version, with no way to get to the old version.

This post captures the sentiment of many members:

IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM YAHOO!
Hi, I am the Project Manager for the new Yahoo Message Boards. I just wanted to let you all know that we will be adding even more new features to the stunning new boards next week:

1) Starting next Monday, all new posts will automatically be translated into Norwegian. Our Yahoo Finance development team decided that users would want this, and since we do not speak directly to users before updating our site, we will assume this is a highly desired feature. The brilliant Stanford Ph.D.’s we hired to update the site thought it would be cool! Due to disk storage issues, we regret that we will no longer be able to offer your posts in English. Please learn Norwegian, and let us know how it goes on our Feedback form! We read every form you send us!

2) As you know, we recently stopped listing stock board posts chronologically, and went to a thread-based system. We feel that stock investors do not need to clearly see the latest posts in chronological order, during the trading day, and our Ph.D. geniuses from Stanford think you would prefer to dig through threads to find old posts on your stocks. More importantly, later this month, we will be removing the dates and times from all posts, and then in September we plan to mix them all up randomly. We hope that you are not inconvenienced by reading 8 year old posts when making investment decisions. Please use the helpful Feedback form to let us know what you think. We read every one!

3) As you may know, in the Beta we switched from a simple and effective system of “recommending” posts with a click, to a more complex one in which you rate posts with stars. Of course, you can only see the number of stars for the first post in a thread, but we feel this is better even if no one ever uses it. Our Ph.D. developers informed us that “complex” equals “better”. So next month, we will replace the star system with a new even more complex one, in which you will manually calculate the cube root of how much you like the post on a scale of 3.4 to 11, and then divide by pi. Please let us know what you think on the Feedback form, which next month will only accept entries in Hexadecimal. We read every post.

Finally, just to get you excited and build some anticipation, I wanted to let you know that our Ph.D.’s are working on a new feature for 2007. Posts will be automatically scanned for keywords by our cool super-complex search technology, to determine if they would be better suited to a different stock board, and if so, they will be automatically moved. We feel the slight inconvenience of having posts moved around by the system will be outweighed by how cool the technology is!

Regards,
Yahoo Finance Development Team Manager ”

The new version defaults to thread-oriented, has a 5-star rating system, and provides a filter to view only highly rated posts, similar to Slashdot. This seems like it could be helpful to people who want to see popular topics. Unfortunately, the new message board format makes it very difficult to view posts in time sequence. It also doesn’t have the old message numbers, so people who kept lists of “useful” posts are out of luck, and in general seems to make it difficult to get to older posts except through search.

There are typically many more readers/lurkers than writer/posters on any message board. The board revisions seem geared toward helping the occasional reader, but also seem unpopular with the current board communities who actually generate the content. There’s a lot of grumbling, and at least some early signs of migration to other boards, such as Investors Hub, Raging Bull, Silicon Investor, and Investor Village.

After some experimenting, I’ve found it a little easier to use after changing the view preferences to “expanded” and “message list”. I suspect the threaded format may eventually help separate traffic between the buy-and-hold crowd and the short term traders, if people stick with the new system. In the meantime, there appears to be a surge of people trying out the other services.

It will be interesting to see how the transition works out. I find the new format more difficult to read, and it seems to be unpopular among the existing communities. On the other hand the new message boards format may be easier for new people to participate, and could grow new communities to replace the existing ones.

There’s some speculation on Yahoo’s intent, this post is representative:

It’s puzzling that yahoo would enforce this new system when there’s been clear evidence (from neglect of the trial format in the last weeks) that it’s not popular. I suspect there is a familiar style of coercive industrial ad mgt driving things. If you use the new format, you are coaxed/forced into playing a sort of teenage interactive popularity contest, like voting for pop stars. I assume this is to persuade advertisers that the system gooses up user enthusiasm. The problem is, as in consumer mkting, the “threads” preselect what you can see and respond to, channeling your attn the way news reporting and ads preselect the reality you can see. In effect, yahoo is part of a larger industrial paradigm in which life is a consumer decision-tree rather than a play of curiosity and discussion / analysis. Part of the frustration being felt is that you know you’re a mouse in a maze. You’re being trapped inside a teenie bopper fan magazine rating “products” rather than sharing ideas. It’s a shame to see such a useful forum crippled by childish advertising trickery.

I’m less cynical about the intent of moving to a threaded view, but it’s clearly an uncomfortable change for many participants who are more engaged there than myself. The challenge for Yahoo is that much of the value in the Finance boards is that there’s enough traffic and/or useful posts on many of them (AAPL, GOOG, TIE, most highly traded stocks) to make it worth checking out from time to time, but the interests of the active board community are different than those of a casual viewer, and for the moment there’s a disconnect in progress. Yahoo may have also picked an inopportune weekend to switch over, since posting volume is likely to be high during the next few days, reacting to events in the Middle East.

I was recently pointed at Instant Bull, a new site intended to scan multiple finance boards. Unfortunately it wants Firefox 1.5, and I’m still running 1.x for now, so I’ll have to check it out later.

Update 07-16-2006 23:00PDT: More from PaidContent, GigaOm, CNet

Update 07-18-2006 19:45PDT: There’s an impressive level of antipathy toward the new message board format. Yahoo Finance members have rapidly started setting up beachheads on other sites. One anecdote from the YHOO board:

ELN on Investor Village shows that over 800 members and over 1800 guests (probably folks checking out alternative boards) have visited in the last 24 hours! Who even heard of Investor Village before this week?

I did a search of messages on Yahoo’s ELN board and saw that there were almost 500 postings between 6AM yesterday and 6AM today (for some reason, Yahoo’s search function is not showing any results for postings after 6AM today), most of which were probably related to complaints about the new format. Then I did a search on the number of postings done since 6AM today on the ELN board on Investor Village and there’s been over 400 posts! Considering they only have 1805 posts in total on the board and considering the number of people that have visited the ELN board on Investor Village in the last 24 hours, it tells me if Yahoo doesn’t find a way to bring back something similar to the old format and the complainers on Yahoo see that their complaints are getting them nowhere, there’s gonna be a mass exodus of all these people that are now posting on or at least checking out Investor Village.

This ‘upgrade’ implementaion has been a disaster. Competitors like Investor Village are taking advantage. Even if Yahoo gains some of their traffic back, they won’t recover all of it just like Coke didn’t gain all of their market share after the New Coke fiasco. If this an indication of Yahoo’s current business model, do you really want to be an investor in this stock as future ‘upgrades’ are implemented????

Vestiges of the “old” system are still around in the non-Finance sections of Yahoo, so others have been trying to set up shop there, such as this alternative AAPL board. I suspect these may not last for long.

Tom Foremski has commented on the uproar about the new message board format in the context of user interface design: “people are creatures of habit and nobody wants to have to learn a new user interface”. I agree, but I think there’s more to it than people not wanting to change. I personally find the new format difficult to visually scan, and in retrospect I see that I tend to watch for interaction among certain individual contributors, as well as for general noise level around various topics. The new system would probably work well for topically driven forums, while many of the high volume forums border on IRC chat.

Message boards are pre-Web 1.0 social software, dating back to the days of dialup BBSes. One view might be that the users just don’t “get” the Web 2.0 fit and finish being wrapped around Yahoo Finance. However, I think the clash here has mostly been about a mismatch between the existing community of users and the use of the site as envisioned by the Yahoo Finance product management team.

I conclude that there’s either a serious gap in how the user testing and feedback process worked, or there’s been a conscious management decision to change the character of the Finance Boards product, to clean up the content and make it better behaved by making it less interactive. Historically, many of the posts are of questionable merit, laced with profanity, innuendo, misrepresentation, and other disinformation. However…if you knew that already, then the flow of the pumper/basher posts itself was a useful data point, along with posts from individual traders and investors offering up independent opinions. Looks like that’s another bit of history now.

YHOO shares dropped hard in after hours trading today, the latest earnings matched, but search monetization isn’t growing well. Ironically, it sounds like at least a few traders shorted YHOO at the close, out of a combination of spite and a sense of management distrust following the message board fiasco. Not a sound rationale for the trade, but it clearly worked out for them.

Update 07-20-2006 14:36PDT - Yahoo has added a link to the old message list view, labeled “view all messages”, next to “view all topics”. The individual posts are still formatted in the “new look” though.

I’m really curious about what effect this is having on traffic and monetization at Yahoo Finance. I recognize a number of user handles that have moved to Investor Village or Investors Hub, and there are daily notices there from the site operators on server upgrades and other steps to accomodate the unexpected boost in traffic.

Some of you may also be interested in checking out SaneBull, an example of an AJAX-based stock info scanner. via TechCrunch

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Finance/Investing, Blogging, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: yhoo, yahoo, finance, socialsoftware, community, management