Do you think it's fair for Yahoo Answers to delete my question asking people if they'd pray for my brother?
I just received an e-mail from Yahoo Customer service stating that they have removed a question in which I asked the community if they would pray for my 29-year-old brother who is believed to have colon cancer. Twenty-eight people responded (because they cared?) - and I see that there are at least 49,000 other questions seeking prayer from the community... the "violation reason" listed for deleting my request was because of "solicitation" -- can anyone understand why my question would be picked out of the bunch, set apart from the rest, and isn't worthy of the same attention (or lack there of) as the other prayer requests? Thanks to those who said they would pray. This is a perfect example, in my opinion, of the types of things that will be happening in the last days... God Bless You All!!
People copying my tattoo - I dont like it...is this wrong?
I love my tattoos...and I want to share them. This is why I post them to websites like rankmytattoo.com and ratemyink.com I thought long and hard about my idea..its not something you see on lots of other people. I hate it when people say things like...oh I love that, I wanted a tattoo but didnt know what...I want to get that. Then they ask me whose my artist. I want to send business to my artist cause he rocks...But I dont want people walking around with my tattoo on them...I know my artist would change it, so it wouldnt be exactly the same. But still this is my idea. Is that wrong? What should I say to someone who says they want my tattoo? - when I see comments like this "I absolutely LOVE this!!!! I want to add to the butterfly already on my lower back, and this would be a great idea. GORGEOUS!!!" on my ratemyink.com page...it makes me cringe...I mean, I want to thank them for the compliment...but tell them to come up with their own idea...is this wrong?
What went wrong with Yahoo? It was once worth almost $125 billion, but today sold to Verizon for $5 billion.
There is no one single reason that Yahoo "went wrong", which I assume means that they aren't seen as one of the top couple of internet companies like they once were. There are product reasons, strategic reasons, and cultural reasons. Some top of mind examples though:Focusing so much for years on Panama (Google Adwords competitor) and search in general, when they ended up losing to Google and eventually outsourcing this to Microsoft.Becoming too unfocused. Yahoo tried to do everything and triggered the famous Peanut Butter Manifesto from Brad Garlinghouse that summarized this problem well.The shift from a desktop world where everyone used home pages to a mobile and social world. Yahoo failed to build their own successful mobile and social products or to acquire any. Yahoo got too bloated, and nobody would ever make the cuts needed to both headcount and its products/properties.Buying Flickr, then letting it languish. Buying Flickr for $35 million was a bargain when you see how huge social photos are today. They could have turned Flickr into the next Facebook or Instagram and instead didn't invest properly in it.Failing to acquire Google and then Facebook. Yahoo had opportunities to buy both of these companies when it was clear they were going to be big successes and instead wouldn't pay what was needed. For example, they had a deal to buy Facebook for $1.1 billion pretty much accepted, then Yahoo's earnings came out and the value of the deal dropped to 800M due to stock compensation and Zuckerberg balked when Yahoo wouldn't change the deal to put the price back up. Think about the value of Facebook today and that Yahoo didn't acquire them over a $300M difference.Leadership changes. Looking at companies like Google and Facebook you'll see that the same leadership has essentially been in place the whole time. Yahoo has had a shifting cast of CEOs and executive teams that has never provided a longer term vision and execution path to take shape.Acceptance of lower quality employees. By the time I worked at Yahoo from 2007-2010, there were still a ton of great A-quality people there, but there were also a lot of B or C-quality people who were not outstanding at their work. This starts to eat away at the company and make the A-players go work elsewhere.There are more reasons, but these provide a good summary...
What is the dumbest question or answer you have ever seen on Yahoo Answers?
I actually have a treasure trove of these that I screenshot myself one day when I was bored. Hold on to your butts.This next one isn’t stupid, but look at what category it accidentally got put into—And my two favorites—
Yahoo Answers is a good idea. Why do idiots ruin it with stupid questions?
The Internet has shown us how truly stupid a lot of people are. Why do they have to continue to demonstrate their idiocy by ruining Yahoo's perfectly good idea about a place to ask and answer questions with their ignorant "funny" "questions"? Aren't there a million chat rooms and message boards for that stuff?
What would happen if Yahoo! Answers and Quora merged?
It’s already happening as we speak!I know it’s hard to believe but such a fusion is taking place as we speak. Although, that merger isn’t taking place in the conventional sense. Quora and Yahoo never had any such deals as far as I know. So why am I saying that it’s already happening?Well! What I am trying to say is that Quora is trying to become more Yahoo Answers like in nature. Remember the recent changes? Remember this happening?I was as outraged as your average outraged Quora member when question details were removed. However, I didn’t understand just how bad the problem was until something happened to me recently. What happened was that I was going through certain technical subjects and came across a few questions that are very interesting. Then it occurred to me that Quora has a lot of STEM and philosphy people who’d be able to explore the ideas further if I shared it here.So what happened next? Well, the absence of the question details made it extremely hard for me to present my case with adequate details. None of the questions were things you could just throw out there and expect a person to answer it satisfactorily. So I just gave up and wondered if I should instead be asking questions like “If there was a battle between tea and coffee, who do you think would win?”.The thing is that there’s a lot of us who prefer online forums to discuss certain technical topics where we can write about the issues and present our cases properly. Quora wasn’t as good as that but at least had the feature that enabled us to at least attempt at addressing complex issues on this platform. What did that mean for Quora? It meant that people who like discussing such complex issues didn’t have to spend their time on forums. They could simply create an account here and enjoy everything from technical issues requiring some elaboration all the way to things like “Why I don’t like celebrity X” type of things.The removal of the question details turned Quora back into another question and answer site for me. Now if you add the problem of the abuse of the report feature by trolls or people trying to silence you, I really don’t think that we are that far away from becoming Yahoo Answers. As the site grows, these abuses will scale up too. Add the fact that we are now being slowly guided towards only discussing simpler issues and you’ll soon realize that we are probably almost certainly headed towards that future.
Need some new ideas for me and the boyfriend (domination)?
So my boyfriend likes to dominate - and since things have kind of become stagnant, I'm wondering what we should do next. Currently, he's into verbal humiliation during sex, making me beg, being rough during oral and he's peed on me. These aren't the typical things I have heard of happening in domination (it's my first time in something like this) so I don't know where to go from here. He's not open to the idea of handcuffs or blindfolds, but he has asked me to call him "master" but I know I would just start giggling if I did. What should we move on to from here?
Is it a good time to join Yahoo as a product manager considering a merger with Verizon?
Well they do look like they are winding down.That has downsides:Whatever part you join might unexpectedly have a headcount reduction, and you could be one of the people that get let go. This seldom comes with any significant lead time.Most of the motivated smart people will have already left, leaving you fewer people to learn fromThey aren't going to be the best paying offerYour part of the company may unexpectedly get sold off, and your position along with it. You may or may not like the new company. They may or may not be interested in keeping the employees. You may or may not have to interview for the position again. You may or may not pass that interview.If they offer stock it isn't likely to be worth anythingAlso upsides:They may be willing to hire people that otherwise would't get a chance at that sort of position. (Note: only good if you can do well in that position!!)Fewer people on important projects will tend to give Jr. Employees more autonomy (Er, or this is bad if you can't do something useful when not given direction)They are more likely to give enough stock that if yahoo unexpectedly recovers it’ll be usefulIs it a bad idea? It depends on what you are hoping to get, and what you need. If you don't have a family to support and they are the only company that you interviewed with that is going to put you on an interesting project, well that sounds like it could be decent. After all you get to do something interesting until it falls apart…and if it doesn't collapse then all the better. On the other hand if you really need a stable income and you have offers from non-startups, well yahoo doesn't sound so exciting.
What lessons can Silicon Valley tech executives learn from what went wrong at Yahoo?
There is only one lesson, and that is there is no reinventing an old business, especially one at this scale. There is no such thing as “too big to fail” in the tech sector.Ask Polaroid, Kodak, MySpace, or AOL. Ask Nokia, Blackberry, IBM, or Sun Microsystems. When your business is centered around a core technology or the momentum of a technological wave, your entire business will be left holding the torch when the technology is left behind by the market. Nothing replaces new technology but new technology, and the fact that you’ve been left behind already implies the new wave has arrived together with their booming businesses, and they are not you.A company is not made of a work force that can easily switch tasks. If the business relies on A, B, and C, their resources will adapt, evolve, and deeply root themselves in A, B, and C. They cannot switch from A to X or B to Y efficiently or quickly. And if there is a business displacing yours with X, Y and Z, well, they’ve already established themselves. The kicker? It’s the exact same advantage you had when you displaced others in your heyday. Nothing has changes, except the times.Businesses have no pivots. If anything, they have seeds of new businesses and opportunities they see. Employees will bring these things with them, but these are building businesses from scratch. If they were truly worth it, they’d be new businesses. Think Twitter.Only the public and naive entrepreneurs believe companies can reinvent themselves. Mayer did everything she could to reinvent Yahoo, but if anything she proved there was nothing left to reinvent. They weren’t going to reinvent search, photo hosting, or social media. They did their best to acquire and aqui-hire in those departments, but there was too little available. It was too little too late.Nothing went wrong. That’s the lesson. It all just went. Entrepreneurs are serial for this reason. They don’t reinvent businesses. They sell, and move on to invent their next business. Tech executives are job hoppers also for this reason. Mayer will end up with another job that will likely pay more than the remaining 99% of us. For better or worse, there is nothing wrong with this picture.