I doubt that has anything to do with it. The Internet being what it is, any article that gets a hit count in the thousands is likely to attract some cowardly, nasty comments. That happens more or less on every platform.

Personally, I believe that Yahoo! probably just wants to head in another direction. I heard recently that they will be offering the next season of "Community" as a Yahoo! exclusive. They've also successfully launched an entertainment program hosted by Michael Yo. My guess is that they felt their money is better spent on acquiring new technology and material for their multimedia endeavors, rather than being tied to a system where they were obligated to pay incremental amounts every month for written content that might no longer have been serving their overall goals.

Of course, that's all supposition, because they did not share their reasoning for the decision.

At any rate, like I said above, I'm grateful for the experience and intend to springboard ahead.

And I should also add that I'm extremely grateful for their decision to return the rights of all of our content to us, since for any of the articles for which we receive upfront payments, we had agreed to grant them exclusive rights. So the fact that they are returning those rights to us is very significant!