What Yahoo killed when it bought Maktoob

雅虎收购 Maktoob 时扼杀了什么

Jun 09, 2026 2026年6月9日

I think I was very young when I had a multi-page argument on a Maktoob forum with a user whose handle I have lost (something like linux-jordan or linux_jordan) about whether Mandrake or Slackware was the more serious distribution for an Arab teenager learning Unix on a hand-me-down Pentium III. He was for Slackware. I was for Mandrake, on the basis, which I would now consider correct, that a fifteen-year-old in a city without a single user group benefits more from a distribution that at least tries to bootstrap him into a working desktop than from one that requires him to write his own rc.d scripts. He called me, I believe, a muqallid (an imitator) for not configuring my own kernel. I called him, I think, something less printable.

我还很年轻的时候，曾在 Maktoob 论坛上与一位用户（我不记得他的网名了，大概是 linux-jordan 或 linux_jordan 之类的）进行过一场长达数页的争论。争论的主题是：对于一个在二手奔腾 III 电脑上学习 Unix 的阿拉伯少年来说，Mandrake 和 Slackware 哪个才是更“硬核”的发行版。他支持 Slackware，而我支持 Mandrake。我当时的理由——现在看来也是正确的——是一个身处连一个用户组都没有的城市里的 15 岁少年，比起那些需要自己编写 rc.d 脚本的系统，从一个至少能引导他进入可用桌面的发行版中获益更多。他称我为“muqallid”（模仿者），因为我没有自己配置内核。我想，我当时回敬了他一些不太文雅的词汇。

I believe that this argument lasted for a while, and had many sub-arguments (sub-threads), it was very heated, sorta of the things you will see the Israeli Intelligence translating in MEMRI. Other people joined in. Someone produced a long post comparing package managers. A moderator, Abu_Abdelrahman489, intervened twice to keep us from going further off-topic and moving the discussion towards what we both think of each other’s mothers. The thread, if I had to guess, ran to about sixty replies. It is gone. The forum it was on is gone. The company that ran the forum is gone. The company that bought the company that ran the forum is also, in any operational sense, gone.

我相信这场争论持续了一段时间，衍生出许多子论点（子线程），场面非常激烈，就像你在 MEMRI（中东媒体研究所）上看到以色列情报部门翻译的那种内容。其他人也加入了进来。有人写了一篇长文对比软件包管理器。一位版主 Abu_Abdelrahman489 两次介入，阻止我们进一步跑题，以免讨论演变成对彼此母亲的问候。如果我没记错的话，那个帖子大约有 60 条回复。现在它消失了。它所在的论坛消失了。运营该论坛的公司消失了。收购了那家公司的公司，在任何实际运营意义上也已经消失了。

Maktoob was founded in Jordan in 1998 by Samih Toukan and Hussam Khoury, originally to provide Arabic-language webmail at a moment when Hotmail did not handle Arabic script reliably and Yahoo Mail did not handle it at all. By 2009 it was the largest Arab portal on the web, sixteen and a half million registered users by their last public number, an email service, a news aggregator, an auction site, a chat product, and a forum network that, in the years it mattered, hosted what was almost certainly the largest body of unstructured Arab cultural production written by ordinary people for the public web. Yahoo acquired it in August 2009 for roughly one hundred and sixty four million dollars. The press release at the time was full of language about “the Arab world’s first online community” and “tremendous growth opportunities.” By 2012 the forums had been migrated, badly, to a new platform. By 2014 they were dead. The email survived a little longer because the email was the asset.

Maktoob 由 Samih Toukan 和 Hussam Khoury 于 1998 年在约旦创立，最初是为了提供阿拉伯语网页邮箱服务，当时 Hotmail 对阿拉伯语字符的支持尚不稳定，而雅虎邮箱根本不支持。到 2009 年，它已成为互联网上最大的阿拉伯门户网站，根据最后一次公开数据，其注册用户达 1650 万。它拥有电子邮件服务、新闻聚合器、拍卖网站、聊天产品以及一个论坛网络。在那个关键时期，该论坛网络几乎可以肯定承载了由普通人为公共网络撰写的、规模最大的非结构化阿拉伯文化产出。雅虎在 2009 年 8 月以约 1.64 亿美元收购了它。当时的新闻稿充斥着“阿拉伯世界第一个在线社区”和“巨大的增长机会”等字眼。到 2012 年，论坛被拙劣地迁移到了一个新平台。到 2014 年，它们彻底消亡了。电子邮件服务存活的时间稍长一些，因为电子邮件才是资产。

The thing to understand about that acquisition, which I have not seen written cleanly anywhere, is the asymmetry between what Yahoo bought and what Yahoo wanted. Yahoo wanted the sixteen and a half million email addresses, which is to say the ad inventory attached to them. It did not want the forums. The forums were, in Yahoo’s view, a liability; a moderation cost, a legal exposure under whatever jurisdiction’s hate-speech regime they were currently being audited against, a thing with no clear advertiser-friendly inventory model. So Yahoo bought the users for the ad inventory and got the forums as part of the package, and the forums, having no place on the post-acquisition balance sheet, were managed down. This is not a conspiracy. It is the ordinary operation of corporate accounting against a thing that was not, in any sense the acquirer cared about, a thing at all.

关于这次收购，有一点我从未在任何地方看到过清晰的论述，那就是雅虎买下的东西与雅虎想要的东西之间的不对称性。雅虎想要的是那 1650 万个电子邮件地址，也就是附带的广告库存。它并不想要论坛。在雅虎看来，论坛是一种负担：是审核成本，是在任何司法管辖区的仇恨言论监管制度下都可能面临的法律风险，是一个没有明确广告友好型库存模式的东西。因此，雅虎为了广告库存买下了用户，而论坛作为包裹的一部分被一并买下。由于论坛在收购后的资产负债表上没有位置，它们便被逐步削减。这不是阴谋，这是企业会计对某种事物进行的常规操作——在收购方关心的任何意义上，那根本算不上什么“资产”。

What was actually on those forums was the documentary record of a specific moment in Arab cultural life, the moment, roughly 2001 to 2009, when a generation of Arab kids first got broadband, first encountered each other across the Mashriq and the Maghrib without going through a state broadcaster or a Gulf newspaper, and first started writing, at length, to one another about politics and software and poetry and football. There were threads on the second intifada that ran for years. There were sub-fora for Algerian users that conducted their entire activity in Darja and that, if anyone had thought to scrape them, would have been one of the few large written corpora of that dialect in existence. There were translation circles. There were religious-debate forums of a kind that would, by 2014, be impossible to host anywhere because by 2014 the bar for what a moderation team could tolerate had collapsed. None of this survives. None of it is in the Wayback Machine in any usable way, because the Wayback Machine’s coverage of dynamic forum software with login walls and PHP session ids is, as we all know by now, statistically zero.

那些论坛上真正记录的是阿拉伯文化生活中一个特定时刻的文献记录——大约在 2001 年到 2009 年间，一代阿拉伯年轻人首次接触到宽带，首次跨越马什里克（Mashriq）和马格里布（Maghrib）地区相互交流，而无需通过国家广播公司或海湾地区的报纸。他们开始就政治、软件、诗歌和足球进行长篇大论的交流。有关于第二次巴勒斯坦大起义（Intifada）的帖子持续了数年。有为阿尔及利亚用户开设的子论坛，他们全程使用达里贾语（Darja）交流；如果有人想到去抓取这些数据，那将是现存为数不多的该方言大型书面语料库之一。还有翻译小组。还有各种宗教辩论论坛，到 2014 年，这些内容在任何地方都无法托管了，因为到那时，审核团队的容忍底线已经崩溃。这一切都没有留存下来。Wayback Machine 中也没有任何可用的备份，因为正如我们现在所知，Wayback Machine 对带有登录墙和 PHP 会话 ID 的动态论坛软件的覆盖率在统计学上几乎为零。

I keep saying that the internet (generally, but more specifically Arabic-specific internet) of 1998 through 2010 was not lost, it was killed. The Maktoob acquisition is the cleanest single case I can name. One transaction, one corporate buyer, sixteen and a half million people’s cultural production downgraded to a non-strategic asset and then, over five years, allowed to evaporate. This is the same argument I tried to make in the Al Jazeera index entry about what survives of AJA’s archive after the algorithm, the mechanism there is different (recommendation-driven attrition rather than acquisition-driven dismantling) but the structure is identical: a thing that was a public good for one community becomes an operational footnote for the company that ends up owning it, and the company manages the footnote according to its own quarterly logic, and the public good ends.

我一直说，1998 年到 2010 年间的互联网（泛指，但特指阿拉伯语互联网）并不是丢失了，而是被扼杀了。Maktoob 的收购是我能举出的最典型的案例。一笔交易，一个企业买家，1650 万人的文化产出被降级为非战略资产，然后在五年内任其蒸发。这与我在半岛电视台（Al Jazeera）索引条目中试图表达的观点相同：在算法之后，AJA 的档案还剩下什么？虽然那里的机制不同（是基于推荐的损耗，而不是基于收购的拆解），但结构是完全一样的：一个对某个社区而言属于公共利益的事物，最终变成了拥有它的公司的运营脚注，而公司根据其自身的季度逻辑来管理这个脚注，于是公共利益便终结了。