If Yahoo acquired either Google or Facebook, we would have probably forgotten about it. And instead something else would spawn on its place, and we’d be asking why Yahoo didn’t buy that something else. [edit reason: grammar.]
The HN thread has a lot of examples of this. Flickr used to be huge. Del.icio.us was also widely popular and both died after their Yahoo acquisition
Yup, pretty much.
For me, an example of that not mentioned in the thread is Yahoo Answers. At least where I live people used Answers a fair bit; first for its intended purpose (Q&A), then to discuss random stuff, under pseudonyms.
But Yahoo never gave enough of a fuck to Answers. Instead the place festered with trolls (…like me, I know), people gaming the points system, and low quality content. Becoming emptier and emptier, until it was eventually closed down.
If Yahoo played its cards right, Quora would never exist, and Reddit would be forever stuck as “we just share links here”, it wouldn’t evolve into a forums-like, forums-killing platform. Lemmy would still pop up, I believe, but as an alternative to some Yahoo service geared towards discussion.
