FORTUNE — Yahoo (YHOO) has announced that it will “retire” about 75,000 Associated Content articles, keeping only “the best content submitted over the last seven years” by basically random people who might otherwise have been writing Amazon reviews or playing World of Warcraft. Yahoo also has renamed the content mill “Yahoo Voices” and has issued new submission guidelines. (For example: no porn. And: “Proofread. Proofread. Proofread.”)
The move will eliminate a sizable (though hardly noticeable) portion of pointless drivel from the Internet. Could this be the beginning of a larger trend of removing odious stuff from the public realm? Perhaps. Just in case, here are some wishful-thinking predictions:
- Kraft Foods will announce the immediate and permanent recall of Lunchables.
- CBS will cancel “Two and a Half Men” and remove it from syndication.
- Hip-hop recording labels will no longer allow their artists to merely list the expensive items they own or the high-end liquors they consume; nor may they brag in public about how many times they’ve been shot or mention any jail time they’ve served (real or imagined).
- All local news stations will replace their on-air staffs with average-looking people who graduated from an accredited college or university.
- TLC will re-rebrand itself as “The Learning Channel” and follow through.
- Both YouTube and the New York Post will permanently disable user comments, to be followed by every other Web site on the Internet.
- The Republican National Committee will hold an emergency session to find what it calls an “electable” presidential candidate.
- Modern Nashville musicians and songwriters will stop referring to whatever that is they produce as “country music.” The Country Music Association will take as its new name the freshly available “Associated Content.”
- Fox News, MSNBC and CNN will pledge to redirect all their efforts and money toward covering the news.
- Facebook will begin automatically deleting status updates written in all capital letters or that complain about having to push “one” for English.
- The Motion Picture Association of America will ban any use of aging makeup that makes an actor look like Marlon Brando after he has just awoken from a coma.
- The one party to remain unmoved by Yahoo’s action will be Demand Media, which says that the creation of pointlessness is its core mission, so why change now?
