When I go through my yahoo email every morning, I first encounter the yahoo homepage, with news stories.
Yahoo is definitely not my main news source (preferring, first, local news, then stuff like Huff Po/NPR/BBC/The New Yorker), but because the first thing I do in the morning is check emails, I then get, out of default, my first exposure of the news of the day via the yahoo homepage. And viewed, I can assure you, with my built-in, shock-resistant bull-shit detector. (thx, E.H. :))
I often liked stormtrooping through their articles’ comments sections, never being obscene or anything - just a catalyst amidst (amid?) a sea of alt right commenters.
With a slight format change, recently, however, also came a change in their posting policies, it seems, because whenever I enter a post or a reply now, it’ll show it, but when I refresh the page, it’ll no longer show it.
Huh…so then…
If I’ve been (uuuuuhhhhhh for WHAT reason?) bannonized (Steve-style?), then, two things: 1. yahoo-wee-eee-eee-yeee! probably should’ve notified me, accordingly, and 2. Really? Yahoo is now becoming the unabashed repository for the alt right? Seriously - the comments are getting more, and more, and more fucking Breitbart-y over the past while, which is the reason for my pitting here.
I think this is an extremely concerning development, because yahoo reaches a gigantic shitload of people.
And believe you me - to reiterate - (to head off at the pass any chucklehead comments along the lines of “aaaaa you just can’t post there anymore”) - my dissensions in the comments sections were always civil, considering they had no BBQ pit there, sadly, for me to call anyone there a gravy-sucking fuckwit asshat.
Any other yahoo emailers here noticed this egregious shittery?
Anyone who comments on online news articles deserves to be taken out and shot, judging by the quality of the comments. So being moderated seems pretty mild.
Being a catalyst has no merit, then? Especially in a forum like yahoo that reaches a lot of people?
ETA: And “being moderated” you’re equating with censure, in this particular instance?
hmmmmm…
I’ve never posted comments on Yahoo!, but do play poke-the-wingnut occasionally on other news sites, just for fun…
HEY! :mad:
…and when I’ve posted something and had it vanish into the aether, it’s been because some word or other alerted their censor-bot, and it’s invariably something completely benign that just happens to include a verboten term. It happens with Amazon reviews sometimes too.
Well then I guess I’ve pinged that bot-fucker a whole shitload considering it’s at least 5 posts (in five different article comment sections) that the Steve Bannonization has been under way.
Really Not All that Bright - Really? You’ve never felt like, as Vinyl Turnip says, “play poke the wingnut” in say, Breitbart, or somewhere similar?
I use a “My Yahoo” page as my homepage. Today it is completely gone, and I get a Yahoo page with a search box and nothing else. Thanks, Yahoo, for fucking up my homepage.
In your case I’d make an exception. Or just have you shot in the leg or something.
Got my hands full just keeping track of and correcting my own idiots on Facebook.
#disappointed, I was expecting this to be complaining about a chili recipe that was too hot for your delicate sensibilities. Got my tastebuds whetted and all…
Not quite understanding the relationship between the thread title and the word salad OP, but hey, who needs clarity?
( We had chili for dinner last night! Yum! )
The OP takes us on an adventure of checking his Yahoo Emails, to being distracted by bright and shinny news articles on Yahoo news, Then after reading said news articles he feels the need to comment on them or other commenters in the comments section.
Now he’s pissed because his posts keep mysteriously disappearing and people can’t see the brilliance of his posts…
Or something…
Here’s the worst thing.
Usually, they put the source of the so-called news under the title of the article and the blurb about it, on the front page. So I know when it says “Forbes”, it’s another Tim Worstall article about the evils of a higher minimum wage, right off the bat, 99% of the time. Saves me a lot of time, because I realize the man is simply having a multi-year long conversation with himself and is impervious to facts and is obviously a paid shill. I know when it says Fox News or Fox News Latino or Fox News Insider or Fox News blah blah blah, it’s an opinion piece from the perspective of the partisan right. And I know when it says CNS news, it’s rabid lunacy from a young earth creationist perspective disguised as news for everyday Christians. I know when it says “The National Interest” it’s just a neo-con masturbatory aid about how amazing it would be to have even better weapons of war.
Usually, the awfulness is right there on display, so I don’t have to click. But not when it comes to…
PJ MEDIA!!!
This stuff they don’t bother to label with the actual source. They disguise the source, and put it under a generic category, such as “Family” or “Lifestyle”, although that’s not the only ones. That way, they can pack 3 or 4 stories from PJ Media on the front page at once, without tipping their hand that the entire yahoo home page has simply become a depository for alt-right garbage.
Count up the number of right-leaning or far-right publications on the front page. Corporate masturbation aids Forbes magazine, International Business Times, Business Insider, International Business Times UK, (and more), RNC opinion dumps Fox News, Newsmax, NY Post, (and more), war fetish rags like the National Interest, and religion rags like PJ Media and CNS News. Mixed with all that is an endless array of sports-related stories, celebrity gossip nonsense, and stories about the latest murder trial or shooting.
It gets less bad when you click on the “News” tab, it’s still pretty bad but then you start to get less political editorial and opinion pieces, and it starts to become more Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, CNN, BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, legitimate news organizations, mistaken for having a far left bias simply because they aren’t mouthpieces for the far right, because when your universe is based on highly partisan extremist assumptions, you project your own faults onto everyone else and assume they’re exactly as partisan, extreme, biased, and craven as you are.
There is still bias, but the bias is still toward violent stories, stories about arms, warfare, murders, etc, and stuff for rich people to read about the market. There’s nothing political there. So your choice is between apolitical stories, and far right opinion pieces.
I mean, you can find left-leaning opinions, if you seek out the occasional Huffington Post or OneGreenPlanet (who the fuck are these people?) or something. But I don’t see the vast left wing conspiracy that the right is reacting to.
I do see insanity like CNS news and PJ Media and Forbes taking up more space than legitimate news organizations on the yahoo front page, and I do see them attempting to hide their PJ Media articles under generic categories, something they do not do with any other source, trying to hide the fact that they’ve obviously sold out completely to far right publications who are paying them to repost this intellect-eating cancer.
Yahoo’s been going downhill for years, their email service keeps getting shittier, and they’ve sold themselves off piece by piece. They used to generate a lot more of their own content, now, they’re basically an abandoned strip mall, where half the stores are still empty, and the rest are basically pawn shops, cash 4 gold stores, payday loan places, a scientology recruitment center, and faith healers who present themselves as a doctor’s office. Whatever gets them clicks, ads, and paid content. Basically, the same people who pay Tim Worstall to write nothing but anti-minimum wage articles several times a week for years as his full time job, also prop up fake news organizations and then pay media outlets like yahoo to distribute their bullshit content.
And the comment sections are cancer, filled with bots and trolls. But you’ll notice it’s targeted. Occasionally, a news article gets posted and before it can get infested with the bots, it’s actually all normal people for a while. Then, a few hours later, it’s completely overrun with bots and trolls. It cannot be saved, there is no cancer treatment available.
If you deliberately look for the left-wing equivalent of Fox News, you’ll find that no such oasis of sanity exists in the mainstream media. Anything that would present the viewpoint of a Bernie Sanders supporter, for example, is a very rare thing.
There’s no money in it. It’s not like people who earn under 50K a year run around buying up newspapers and media outlets. That’s what rich people do, and why there’s fewer and fewer legitimate news organizations left, and more and more mouthpieces of the Rupert Murdochs of the world. And when those pieces aren’t slanted enough, you can always find bloggers. Why have reporters and news when you can have spin and partisan hackery? And you get more and more people who cannot tell the difference between this and real information. And then you have “PizzaGate” and Trump supporters who think he’s telling it like it is. He’s saying what they’ve read in insane disconnected from reality blogs, it must be true. Hell, he’s even appointing people to his cabinet who were directly responsible for spreading the PizzaGate lie. Obviously he’ll get to the bottom of this pizza-themed child sex ring that Hillary Clinton owns and operates, and that’s ultimately why she should be in jail. Lock her up!
Oh, you can find articles covering pizzagate on yahoo, from legit organizations covering it, and then the comments section is filled with people who are basically 9/11 truthers about this, dominating the entire space.
This isn’t a reflection of reality. In real life, people are not all frothing at the mouth, thinking that Hillary Clinton literally owns a child sex ring. I won’t put even right-wing conservatives or most Trump supporters in that basket. I’ve read the discourse, divided as it may be, outside of the yahoo comments section, and only the fringiest of the fringe comes close to that level of dumb. But when they comprise more than 50% of the comments, and are upvoted a thousand times, that’s all you see. Actual people get drowned out by the trolls and the bots.
Much like yahoo messenger chat rooms, it’s become fully metastasized cancer, and there is nothing redeeming about it. The best thing yahoo can do right now is to die as quickly as possible.
It’s no longer a legitimate debate between liberals, moderates, or conservatives. It’s the Young Earth Creationists getting control of the school board and replacing all the science classes and history classes with church dogma, and calling legitimate conservatives and normal Republicans a bunch of “cucks”.
It’s harder and harder to remember that such people exist. It’s really hard to remember what moderate Republicans are, even though they should be the majority of Republicans. The reason being, the media is always further right than they are, the pundits are, and the bloggers are, and the comment sections are full of white supremacists.
That can’t actually reflect the reality of the Republican party. This would be like if the worst of the anti-vax, wifi-fearing Jill Stein cuckoo birds got ahold of every major news outlet not controlled by the far right, and took over the Democratic party, and had no connection to either reality or the typical Democratic voter.
I don’t know what to set as my home page, in order to not get flooded with utter nonsense every time I’m online. I don’t want to simply put a liberal blog as my front page, I want real news. But places like CNN are trying so hard to be non-partisan, that they are basically pretending this alt-right white nationalist invasion of reality isn’t happening and that it is business as usual, even as their viewers drop in quantity, and the news is getting replaced with dogma.
I can’t look. Now with the confirmation by the CIA that Russia is systematically destroying our information services, it’s not just Australian media moguls representing the robber baron era of societal progress that we have to worry about. At this point, it’s harder and harder to find reality. And when more and more people cannot tell the difference between reality and fake news, that is the end of democracy. It’s not the electoral college that is the problem. It’s the voter and all the resources available to the voter which are compromised.
I have my Yahoo mail page simply tabbed on my bookmarks bar. I click it and get my email directly without having to click through anything. My browser is my homepage - the searchbar - so I just launch wherever I want to go from there. Why I would want to do it the annoying way I couldn’t guess.
She does? :eek: Someone should alert the authorities.
Grr!, Elbows, and Kambuckta -
If the following…
(hand-holding bold)
…was above your heads, then congratulations for passing Hmmm I Guess I Must Be On The Obtuse Side 101A.
(good post, btw) Yeah those lone islands of sanity are certainly dwindling.
So yeah - screw yahoo now.
It was basically during the last year that it really started to go downhill - seemingly concurrent with the unfolding of that barf-laden election thingy, and in the past couple months, the alt right idiocy seems to have been wratched up exponentially.
Sucks - it wasn’t that long ago when yahoo news had something called diversity of opinion in the comments sections.
Now - no.
Gee I wonder what are the next mainstream platforms that the alt right scumbag masses will subsume next?
Definitely all the more reason to completely jump ship.
Sounding more and more like a shipwreck now.
Deleted
I’ve been a Yahoo! user since the late 1990s and at one time it was a pretty solid and innovative website. I remember being fascinated with their online bill pay service and I used to use other services like Yahoo Launch (before there was Pandora).
But it’s just gotten to be an unbearable haven for stupidity. THeir conservative bias was starting to become somewhat noticeable a few years ago but the last straw was getting fed a steady stream of TMZ style content. Like I give a rats bum about Rob Kardashian.
Yahoo sucks in every imaginable way, and you don’t even have to be a direct user to see it. My ISP unfortunately outsources their email to Yahoo which I access via POP3 from a local client, and I have all kinds of occasional problems including dropped connections, none of which ever happen with Gmail. It’s a dying mess of dysfunction and Marissa Mayer appears to have made pretty much zero difference to anything I can see.