That was my experience as well, Yahoo Groups were great, I was an active member in several of them. Then the redesign made it completely unusable, the last one I tried to use was the local Freecycle group and after trying for some time to post something I gave up. I cannot fathom what they were thinking, unless their goal was actually to ruin it so thoroughly that they could shut it down. Absolutely nobody liked the change, within a few months every one of the groups I was in was all but dead.