Angry letter to Yahoo’s PM for Yahoo Finance
From the 11ish archive: written in October 2020. Prices, numbers and views are from then and are not investment advice today.
Dear Yahoo,
You are assisting in the ruins of financial literacy. I’ve been an avid user of yahoo finance for as long as I can remember. It is a simple no fuss service that has helped me learn how to invest and make a lot of money over the period of about a decade.
However, in recent years I’ve noticed that you’re making it worse and worse. Two updates stood out the most. The first one you’ve been doing for awhile now and that is you embedding ads with news. The second is you recently decided to make quarter earnings a “premium” feature.
This is utter bullshit.
In a world where there are already enough problems getting people to be excited about acquiring financial literacy, you mix valuable content with clickbait and you prevent users from easily accessing all valuable PUBLIC financial information just so you can make a few bucks.
As an aspiring entrepreneur and professional product manager myself, I understand the urge to monetize every bit of every user experience and create new monetization streams on existing user segments. But don’t you think you should be drawing a line in the sand somewhere, so that you don’t become complicit in effectively helping newly minted ambitious young traders from gambling away their money? Do you seriously expect them to pay 100 bucks a year from their starter bankroll just so they can see more numbers? They will be much more likely to ignore and trade with partial information. In which case, they have at best limited and at worst INCORRECT understandings of how a business is doing.
Same thing with your stupid embedded ads. Instead of doing proper due diligence, they start seeing ridiculous links to get rich schemes just so YOU can get rich first. That’s a fajita-ing dick move, Yahoo.
I hope you see this, consider my words, and change your ways. If you don’t, I will have to abandon my 10 year streak and move one more service from Yahoo to Google.
Don’t be a fajita-ing dick, Yahoo.
Disclosure: No payment was received for this post. This is commentary from October 2020, not investment advice.
