A portal is for serendipitous discovery, while search is highly directed.
This post initially appeared on Forbes.com March 25, 2011.
I’ve been lamenting for a while about the incivility found in the commentary on Yahoo’s news pages, the steady rain of thousands of nasty remarks below each and every article. But the clouds seem to be parting a bit.
Whether my posting had anything to do with it, I can’t tell. I’d like to think so. But in the weeks since I published Anti-Social Networking, Yahoo has been fiddling with its comments section, experimenting with ways to manage the flow of invective.
During a particularly difficult news cycle recently, the comment areas in the news section were simply closed. I don’t know what all those underemployed people did for fun during that spell, but Yahoo just took the pages down. Take that, you nasties!
In the past week to 10 days, I noticed a subtle enhancement that may have turned the tide. Merely by setting the default order in comments to “Highest Rated” first, Yahoo was able to change the tone of the section dramatically. Thus, to get up toward the top, a comment must now have a lot of positive votes, which tends to promote the most positive statements. Not always, though. In one case, a slew of anti-government, anti-tax comments were voted to the top of a story about government expenditures.
And in many cases, the comments that float up are mawkish and sentimental. Stories about deaths of important or heroic people get a lot of “R.I.P., God bless you,” and so on. But the quality of those first few remarks is definitely up compared to the abyss from which they emanated previously.
At first, I thought the change in default was just a quirk of my browser and left it at that, but then I found a comment right at the very top of more than ten thousand others, with 48 thumbs up and only 3 thumbs down, which read: “YAHOO, Display newest comments first by default. Who cares what was said days ago before the story was re-written.” That woke me up to the fact that everyone was seeing the same thing and quite a few didn’t like it. Despite what the commenter wrote, the thumbs-up voters didn’t like the new order not because of the age of the posts, but because there was no reward for being mean-spirited. Say something nasty and you go right to the bottom. It’s not a perfect fix, but it is elegant, simple, and universal (one size fits all).
Most people take default settings. This human behavioral fact is one of the main reasons that rivals argued, during the various suits a decade ago against Microsoft by the Department of Justice and the European Commission, that it wasn’t enough to simply place the icons for their browsers on the Windows desktop; the intervention had to occur at the moment of first browser selection. Otherwise, most folks would just take Internet Explorer because it was easier. Defaults matter.
Now, why worry so much about Yahoo? After all, isn’t it so last generation? I would argue that Yahoo is still one of the most important properties on the Internet, despite its various woes and missed opportunities. The main reason is that Yahoo is a portal, maybe the last of the big portals. Portal, for you Latin scholars, comes from the word for “door,” and the idea of a portal is that you walk in the front door before branching off to your desired sub-pages. Portals are about discovery rather than search. AOL was the first major portal.
The highest traffic on the Internet goes to Google, but Google generated a new model, one where visitors go in the “side door” rather than the main entrance. They are just as likely to use a toolbar as go to Google’s home page. They use the search tool to find something they’re looking for and enter that site right at the point where the material they’re looking for sits. They don’t pass through either Google’s portal or that of the site Google sent them to.
In this world of side doors, the traffic is all dispersed. According to Alexa, Google gets hits from about 50% of the world’s internet users, but although that traffic may touch Google’s servers, it is going all over the place. The next two sites in Alexa’s rankings are Facebook, with about 40%, and YouTube, with about 26%. Both are also “side-door” companies. Then comes Yahoo with about 25%. Of course, percentages add up to more than 100% because most people go to multiple venues.
Arguably Yahoo is one of the last sites to concentrate traffic rather than dispersing it, a key factor in the high ad rates Yahoo can still charge for its front and top-level section pages. Google makes more money charging a penny here and a penny there for hits on millions of sites, but Yahoo makes more per page on its best pages.
So, given that Yahoo is still an important property, the standards that it sets for Internet behavior matter. If the company can promote civility, that tone may carry elsewhere on the Internet and perhaps make it a safer, more pleasant place to spend time.
© 2011 Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
