This might not seem terribly "dumb" to most people but I have been monitoring Yahoo News for many years and not for information either because they have always been incredibly biased in the stories they feature and this came to an apex when Trump was in office.
Over the past week, Yahoo is starting to feature more and more conservative articles by outlets such as the Washington Examiner and even Fox in their feed.
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If you are under 30 years of age you probably don't remember that there was a time when Yahoo dominated the internet and were basically considered one of the most valuable companies in the world. Through a loooooooooooooong string of very bad decisions, one of which was passing on acquiring Google for next to nothing, few people use their services at all now.
About 2 or 3 years ago their comments sections was swarmed with conservative voices in about a 2 out of 3 ratio despite the fact that Yahoo featured almost exclusively liberal news sites in their feed. Yahoo's answer to this was to shut down the comments section entirely - which was kind of a dick move because the comments section was far more entertaining and informative than the actual articles were.
I don't know what has happened in Yahoo since then but I would imagine that they lost a lot of clicks in the meantime because some people probably liked to go there just for the battle between the comments section experts.
Yahoo should have taken the hint that based on the comments that maybe, just maybe they should start to embrace the conservative side of things as well but instead they just kept doing what they had been doing and feature 20 left-leaning articles for every 1 right-leaning one. I would imagine that this lead to a large drop off in traffic once the comments section was eliminated.
Axios and NBC can be considered only slightly to the left (NBC a bit more than Axios) but The Washington Examiner is pretty far to the right and I think people could correctly suggest that this news site / paper only exists as a Yang to The Washinton Post's Yin.
While I didn't read the articles because The Examiner's op-ed pieces are a foregone conclusion, it came as quite a shock to me that Yahoo was featuring their articles at all. Normally they feature very far to the left articles such as those that are written by The Huffington Post or The Daily Beast.
So is Yahoo scrambling yet again? Are they actually trying to be a bit more balanced in their coverage? I wouldn't hold your breath over that but if I was an executive over at Yahoo this inclusion of articles from all sides is something that I would have done years ago and I also would have left the comments section open. That was a massively stupid move on their part since the entire objective behind websites is to have some reason for people to return to the site.
Scrolling down their news page is still an exercise in futility because they are almost entirely op-ed pieces as per usual and if you have a functional brain you only need to read the headline and who the article is by in order to already predict what the conclusion of said piece is going to be. Yahoo, at least for now, seems to have a little bit of smarts going on right now but they are still a relative non-issue when it comes to really anything at all. Are purveyors of "news" starting to realize that people don't really like being indoctrinated?
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I think that this is likely too little too late but it was something that took me by surprise. I consider the Examiner and Fox articles to be just as "dumb" as HuffPo and Daily Beast though and I think most people with reasonable levels of intelligence and a dislike for echo chambers feel the same way. In the meantime, by making this move if they decide to stick with it, will make Yahoo just a tiny bit less....
