Farewell, Yahoo Groups

My first exposure to the wider pulp community came through America Online’s and Usenet’s newsgroups back in the 1990s. Prior to that era, it was difficult to connect with other fans of pulp magazines.

The rapid growth of the World Wide Web (does anyone remember that name these days?) effective rendered AOL obsolete, and participants in AOL’s pulp newsgroups migrated to alt.pulp, alt.fan.doc-savage, and other Usenet groups.

By the mid-2000s, Yahoo Groups began growing in popularity. They allowed for moderation, file and photo storage, and both web and email access for reading and posting. The late 2000s saw a proliferation of niche pulp groups, with nearly three dozen Yahoo Groups whose topics ranged from fiction magazines in general to pulp genres to pulp authors and characters.

One of the big benefits of the Yahoo Groups was retention of content. Usenet groups depended on a loose network of servers retaining newsgroup posts for typically about four years because of storage capacity. While Yahoo Groups retained all posts, which were accessible via the Web to users.

(Don’t get me wrong. The Usenet groups weren’t perfect. They were subject to spam posts and could be easily overrun by posts that often seemed to be about weird conspiracy theories that were broadcast to dozens of groups at a time. And since they were unmoderated, there wasn’t much you could do about that.)

ThePulp.Net’s newsgroup page was a central directory for pulp groups on Yahoo and Usenet (and Google Groups, which are web versions of the Usenet groups). We rated them based on participation levels. And over the years, it was obvious participation rates were dropping.

A few years back, Facebook groups exploded in number. Anyone could create a group, and there was a readily available audience eager to join often many groups. Unfortunately, many of the Facebooks groups don’t have the active discussions that the Usenet or Yahoo Groups had, and often posts are simply self-promotion for New Pulp authors or promotions for new pulp reprints or books.

While I don’t mean to say that’s bad, I miss the lively discussion between pulp fans — which gave pulp fans from faraway locations a community in which to virtually meet — that was the reason for the groups in the first place. You could learn a lot during those discussions.

In 2013, Yahoo introduced a controversial “neo” update to the Groups interface that drove users to the Facebook groups. Those that stuck it out on Yahoo sometimes faced outages, which seemed to happen more often. (Oh, and the sale of Yahoo to Verizon in 2017 hinted at its diminished future.)

It became clear that Yahoo wasn’t very interested in hosting users’ discussions on their sites, particularly for free.

Then earlier this month, the future of Yahoo Groups became clear: They were going away. As of yesterday (Oct. 28), users can no longer upload content to the groups. Then on Dec. 14, Yahoo will wipe user content from its servers.

All of the information that users have uploaded over the past decade or so will be gone unless it is downloaded or migrated elsewhere.

Some groups had seen the handwriting on the wall and moved to Groups.io, an email groups service. One of the most active pulp-related groups, FictionMags, finally made the move in the past month.

I will be working to update ThePulp.Net’s newsgroup page as I figure out which Yahoo Groups are transitioning to new locations and which ones are simply dying.