Yahoo! Message Boards

» see messages.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Yahoo Finance launched on 19 January 1997, and under the quote and the chart for every listed company there was a link that said Messages. Behind it sat an open board about that one stock, posted to by anyone with a Yahoo account under any name they felt like using. There was no editor and no cost.

The whole system lived at messages.yahoo.com and covered far more than money. Boards existed for health conditions and for individual small towns. The finance side is the part history remembers, because that is where the volume went and where the consequences landed. One board cleared just under twelve thousand messages in a single day in 1998, which for a text forum on 1998 infrastructure was a flood.

What made the finance boards matter was that people acted on them. A rumor about an earnings miss posted at two in the morning by someone calling themselves a string of digits could move a thinly traded stock before the market opened. The Securities and Exchange Commission eventually came for several posters who had been running pump schemes out of the boards.

In 1999 I was fifteen, on a modem in Turkey, with a phone bill that made aimless browsing something you thought about first. Yahoo for me was a directory and later a mail address. A board arguing about a Nasdaq ticker was a room off the side of a building I used for two other things entirely.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ john doe, defendant ~

Companies hated the boards, and in the late 1990s their lawyers found a procedure. You filed a defamation or trade-secret suit against a John Doe defendant, which you were allowed to do without knowing who the defendant was, and then you used early discovery to subpoena Yahoo for the IP address and email behind the screen name. The suit was frequently never meant to go anywhere. Unmasking the critic was the point, and once the employer knew which employee had been posting, the matter was handled off the record.

Yahoo at first handed the records over without telling the poster anything. After enough complaints it changed policy and began emailing users that their identity had been subpoenaed, giving them fifteen days to go to court and fight it. That window is why these cases produced law instead of just firings. Dendrite International v. Doe No. 3 in New Jersey and Doe v. 2TheMart.com in Washington set the tests that American courts still apply before an anonymous online speaker can be named, and both grew directly out of posts on Yahoo boards.

~ the spring cleaning ~

Marissa Mayer took over Yahoo in July 2012 and spent the following year closing things. The 1 March 2013 announcement killed the BlackBerry app, Yahoo Avatars, App Search, Sports IQ, Clues and the message boards site, all effective 1 April. The company's wording was that it wanted fewer products done better.

The notice included a carve-out that tells you where the remaining traffic actually was: boards attached to individual properties, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Fantasy Sports among them, stayed up. The destination site died while the feature survived underneath other pages.

~ where the argument went ~

Yahoo Finance pulled its own boards in 2019 and replaced them with a moderated comment system called Conversations, which required a login and deleted on sight the sort of thing the old boards ran on. That is the real end date for the form, twenty-two years after it started.

By then the crowd had rebuilt itself somewhere with better tooling. StockTwits took the ticker-tagged stream, Reddit took the thread structure, and in January 2021 a forum full of pseudonymous retail investors moved a stock hard enough to break a hedge fund, which is exactly what the Yahoo boards had been accused of attempting twenty years earlier at a fraction of the scale. Nothing about the behavior was new. Only the audience size was.

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