Why? Because it may (just may) help many people see the light.

Yahoo Groups, one of the last vestiges of the old Yahoo of the “dot com” days, will shut down on December 15, 2020. This is “the end of the road for one of the internet’s largest message board systems of its time”:

Yahoo’s owner, Verizon, had announced in October 2019 that users would no longer be able to create new content (discussions) to the site after October 21. Now, they have confirmed (see the ZDNet link above for details) that the Yahoo Groups website will be taken offline in mid-December 2020.

Verizon was also so kind to “kill any attempts for users to archive their past discussions”.

Yay! Here is why I am happy

I am happy because the more “shocks” like this Web users get, the sooner they will realize that it is really dumb to “store” writings, picture, movies, online discussions, or anything else digital…

to any provider that does not guarantee, in any moment, an easy way out. A way, that is, to:

1. download everything (everything!) you entrusted that provider with, on your own computer…
2. in a way that keeps all that “everything” fully usable

For more examples of why this is important, think to all the “data” and “documents” that belong to you, but are inside your social network accounts: how much of that stuff would remain with you if those platforms disappeared tomorrow?

This is why I am happy that Verizon is pulling the plug, and even more that is “killed attempts to archive past discussions”: I hope that it will be the last time that something so predictably stupid happens.

Surely it’s not the first: in case you had missed it, what Verizon will soon do to Yahoo Groups is the same thing that Yahoo itself did to Geocities in 2007.

For even more examples that if your digital stuff disappears is YOUR fault, read here