What is Yahoo afraid of that they closed the news discussion groups?

Question

Guess someone didn't like the fact that they couldn't control the direction the online discussions were going.

Answer 1

yahoo isnt like that but we all have rules to keep
you talking about the yahoo news discussion or is there some other group i coulda been yapping on .
we all have rules all i can think is we must of broken some rule somewhere
but yeah i miss being able to make the news fair and balanced too

Answer 2

Though it was fun sometimes to respond to the news, a lot of it went nowhere fast. If it was a hot topic, it disappeared from the page in about two minutes. Also, some people were really dominating some discussions by repeatedly posting, which would be OK if it were thoughtful, but a lot of times they were just a couple of useles words ("you're right about that!" "amen", etc.), so you spent a lot of time clicking and reading nothing. Finally sometimes threads would get started and run in directions that had nothing to do with the news story. So by the time you were ready to weigh in, you were writing response #287 and the discussion had somehow moved from Iraq to the best chocolate chip cookie recipes.

Finally, the possiblity for interaction led to some idiotic name calling. And people were really irresponsible with their writing at times. I would occasionally see a story that was incredibly tragic and would read the Yahoo responses just to see if finally some sort of limit had been reached. Maybe here was a story that was so horrible, so full of pain and tragedy, that the racists, and homophobes, and religious crackpots, and other assorted idiots would finally lay off. It never happened. It was sickening. I was always hoping that no friends or family members read Yahoo. Since they couldn't control it, I think they decided to pull the plug.

I don't know for sure that that is the answer, but I'm hoping they can come up with some alternative soon.