What Yahoo killed when it bought Maktoob | La Vita NouvaJun 09, 2026<br>※ ※ ※<br>What Yahoo killed when it bought Maktoob<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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...