Did yahoo do away with their sports message boards?

Did Yahoo purposely screw up its Message Boards, Astrology and News products in an attempt to bankrupt itself?

• Yahoo had a good thing going a few years ago. They have since gone downhill fast. The old message boards were easy to use and tied in to news articles. They had loads of traffic, which equates to page hits and thus revenue in internet terms. Now the message boards are separated from the news and have no flow, so they are annoying to use. All the trolls have moved to Yahoo Answers and screwed that up. Yahoo screwed up its Astrology section a couple of months ago. It no longer flows, so it is a pain to use. It is also cluttered with a bunch of extraneous links that don't fit in. It is easier to go straight to Astrology.com to get the same info because that site has a good flow that makes it easy to transit pages. Now Yahoo has screwed up its News. They started hiding the articles. They give you a couple of paragraphs and then make you click another link to complete the article. There is a bunch of unrelated crap at the bottom of the page now instead of the rest of the article. It is easier to go to MSN, AOL, or any one of a thousand more portal sites to get the same news without having to add on extra clicks. Is Yahoo messing up all of their previously fine products in an attempt to bankrupt itself? Are they purposely turning their user base away from Yahoo.com and towards easier to use portals that have better flow? Or are they just suffering from these poor decisions and not realizing they are responsible for turning users away?

• Answer:

  Yahoo is always messing up a good thing. They keep making changes that make it harder to use. It just doesn't flow as smooth as it used to. The user experience has gone way down. It is now frustrating to try to read an article or horoscope or whatever because they make you jump through hoops with extra clicks or having to hit the back button to move forward. I don't know if they are doing it to go bankrupt on purpose or not, but is sure does turn users away by frustrating them. Many internet portals have come and gone by frustrating users instead of making their experience a pleasurable one.