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Yahoo Answers, a Repository for Stupid Questions, Is Shutting Down (vice.com) 94

Posted by msmash from the end-of-an-era dept.
After 16 years of asinine questions and dubious answers, Yahoo Answers is shutting down next month. From a report: The company announced that starting April 20, users won't be able to post new questions or answer other people's questions; on May 4, the site will become inaccessible, and will redirect to the Yahoo homepage. Users who've posted questions and answers in the past can download their data via request before June 30, 2021, here. "While Yahoo Answered was once a key part of Yahoo's products and services, it has become less popular over the years as the needs of our members have changed," an announcement that went out to users, as spotted by the good people of the r/DataHoarder subreddit, said.
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Yahoo Answers, a Repository for Stupid Questions, Is Shutting Down More

Yahoo Answers, a Repository for Stupid Questions, Is Shutting Down

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  • Though I haven't used it much in recent years, I made the Art of Trolling front page no less than five times due to my answers there.

    I'm also annoyed Cheezeburger couldn't keep their databases straight and reset the like count and comments so many times it's hard to tell which ones were actually there....

  • Came up with a product idea for that site. (Score:5, Funny)

    by pecosdave ( 536896 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @04:30PM (#61240206) Homepage Journal

    I found a place in China that would let you make custom "Magic 8 Balls".

    I seriously considered having a batch of them made, in pink or lavender and naming them "Internet Pregnancy Tests".

    The idea was to have answers like "Twins", "It was Aliens" and "Yes but it's not yours" to the answer "could I be pregnant?" which made up an unreasonably high percentage of questions on there.

  • Literally burn it to the ground and live stream the event. I'll sell you an NFT of the stream.

    • Charging money for this as a pay-per-view event would amount to more revenue than all the rest of Yahoo for the past 5 years.

      • Better to burn out than to fade away.

        As crazy as it sounds the NFT alone would probably be more valuable than Yahoo.

  • Yahoo! Messenger died years ago. Comments section on Yahoo News was removed, probably because the people on it were so horrid. Yahoo Answers, their version of Quora is no more.

    Maybe this social media stuff doesn't make them any money. But I suspect it draws in clicks and search results and keeps people engaged to their site. Who ever is making these decisions at Yahoo is probably screwing things up big time for the company.

    • Yahoo's offerings are not unique. They are a competitor in markets where the winners have already been firmly established. Free email is provided by Google and Microsoft. Facebook is the undisputed king of social networking. Quora defeated Yahoo Answers long ago. Slack has instant messaging covered. And for online news and other services, there is a litany of alternatives.

      Yahoo put up a fight, but it didn't come out on top anywhere. Now, it is just slowly withering away.

      • Yahoo put up a fight

        Yahoo only put up a fight on each front after it was clear they were losing.

        Yahoo was once the king of search but failed to improve, leaving room for a little upstart called "Google". Larry and Sergey even offered to sell the Google search engine to Yahoo for $1M. Yahoo turned them down because they didn't think search was important.

        Yahoo Answers sucked. Stupid questions and even stupider answers. On Quora, better questions and better answers bubble to the top. Stackexchange does an even better job (al

        • Jerry Yang fucked Yahoo shareholders harder than anyone. He was thankfully fired, but way too late. This dumbshit turned down a $44.6 BILLION buyout offer. This was the most Yahoo would ever be worth. It's been nothing but downhill from there.

    • Re:Yahoo running away from social media (Score:4, Insightful)

      by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @06:02PM (#61240540) Journal

      This is by no means unique to Yahoo. It's all what I call "death by redesign". It's not as sudden or severe as Digg. It's more of a slow, steady decline. In the beginning there was a hierarchical search, and mail, and finance pages... and they rocked. The finance was clean, and simple. It used GNUplot for charts. It loaded fast. Do I even need to tell you the rest of this story? Yeah, comments are a cesspool but that's not all to it. In the rush to extract more ad rev, and look better on tablets and/or phones, they do what so many sites do: make it virtually unusable to their existing PC user base while failing to attract the hip new people they were seeking. Then when they see they're not getting out of the hole, they dig deeper.

      Yahoo was big enough to get kept alive by Verizon or something, I forget. I pulled the plug on my mail there a couple years ago, not because I liked it; but because it isn't always easy to tell all contacts about the switch, especially biz contacts and sites you might like or have forgotten about. At some point, I switched to accessing it using Thunderbird because the interface was so horrid, so there goes the ad revs, Yahoo, and if you stopped allowing POP3 at this point it wouldn't bother me because I haven't even opened Thunderbird in six months to check it.

      The only thing left for me is finance, and even that's becoming unusable. You have to wait for some gawdawful thing to process when you type a ticker in to search. If you just hit enter too soon, it does a regular search, totally losing the finance context! How brain dead is that? It's super-spiffy JavaScriptacular though, as the leader of whatever team built that monstrosity no doubt told the managers.

      It's what Slashdot almost became!

      • Yahoo also supports IMAP which I've used with thunderbird for years

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Yahoo Japan is still going strong. It was originally a joint venture between Yahoo! and Softbank, but Yahoo! sold its stake long ago.

        As well as a popular search engine, Yahoo Japan has many other businesses. One of the most popular is Yahoo Auctions, which is much bigger than eBay in Japan.

    • There where a lot of trolls in the Yahoo News which made it almost useless. But the reason that Yahoo News shut down the comments section, same reason CNN and other liberal sites did, because they got tired of their agenda being reviled in the comment sections. They would post a story full of half truths or down right lies and people would correct them in the comments sections. It got to be to much for the moderators to come along and delete the corrections. Easier to just close the comments and ca

      • they got tired of their agenda being reviled in the comment sections.

        Do you honestly think news executives, even ultra liberal ones, give a crap about what some grandfather and retired navy vet has to say on their comments section? That people are showing up every single day, reading stuff, clicking on stuff, and seeing ads seems like easy money. I can't imagine a CEO that is so thin skinned that they care what some randos are saying. If anything the right-wing push back against the liberal media would only fuel more left-leaning articles because they're getting so many page

        • Yeah, that is pretty much the reason the comment sections are gone. It was a big problem for CNN. You could just skip the articles and go right to the comment section for the truth. Jeff Zucker is such a fucking control freak that he couldn't stand have CNN's lies and half truths corrected by The Truth on their very own site.

          Yahoo did it for the same reason. They shutdown the comment section for that very reason. The only difference between CNN and Yahoo is Yahoo admit that it was the reason they d

    • And to think they started as a search engine provider. Does anyone still use Y! Search? Or the Y! Toolbar, or even the new Y! Messenger that's integrated into Y! Mail?

  • Quora (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    While Yahoo Answered was once a key part of Yahoo's products and services, it has become less popular over the years as the needs of our members have changed

    The bots, CCP shills, and trolls all migrated to Quora.

    • and Slashdot.

    • The bots, CCP shills, and trolls all migrated to Quora.

      Don't forget the just plain wrong "answers." Lots of those on Quora too. I guess we should be grateful for the existence of sites like this though, it makes it nice and easy to spot whe some idiot has done all their homework or research on Quora.

  • A Repository for Stupid Questions (Score:4, Funny)

    by BeerFartMoron ( 624900 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @04:47PM (#61240276)
    Looks like I'll be spending more time on Ask Slashdot [slashdot.org].

  • Great, so how about Amazon (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Snotnose ( 212196 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @04:47PM (#61240278)
    I don't usually mind answering questions about stuff I've bought from Amazon. Then I bought printer ink, cuz the refill place I've used for the past decade turned into a pizza shop last time I needed ink.

    I am now inundated with questions of "will this ink work with my xxx printer?". How the hell would I know? I have a printer, the ink worked with it. As it should, the page explicitly said my printer was supported.

    What, you think I'm going to buy one of your printers, order ink for it, and see if it works? Yeah, how about no on that.

    Amazon needs a "stupid question" button I can push once and get no more "does this specific thing work with my other specific thing" so I don't get any more questions on it.

    • They also need a stupid answer button. The only thing dumber than getting the "will this ink work with my xxx printer?" questions in your email are the "I don't know, I have yyy printer" answers they show on the product page.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Scoth ( 879800 )

        They did at least add an "I don't know" button that avoids the whole thing. This drastically cut down on the number of answers that were some variety of "I don't know" or "Maybe" or "Boat"

    • Walmart does the same thing just not as bad. Really, I feel like tech support every time I get these questions.

    • Re:Great, so how about Amazon (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Zontar_Thing_From_Ve ( 949321 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @06:49PM (#61240688)

      I don't usually mind answering questions about stuff I've bought from Amazon. Then I bought printer ink, cuz the refill place I've used for the past decade turned into a pizza shop last time I needed ink.

      I am now inundated with questions of "will this ink work with my xxx printer?". How the hell would I know? I have a printer, the ink worked with it. As it should, the page explicitly said my printer was supported.

      Yeah. I have found that people really suck at asking questions. They skip the critical stuff that needs to be asked and include all kinds of irrelevant information that makes it impossible to answer the question because it's theoretically possible that the weird included information is actually very important but they didn't explain why.

      For example, here's a theoretical question someone might ask about printer ink that is good:
      I have the Acme ABC811 printer but this ink is rated for the Acme 810 printer. Will it work on the 811?
      That is a great question. I may not know about the ABC811 printer, but somebody else might. Maybe the 811 uses the exact same ink as the 810 but somebody can probably answer that. Unfortunately, here is what kind of question people really ask:
      I live in western Kentucky and my printer is on the 2nd floor of a 2 story house where I only have a wifi connection and I only use the printer on Saturday mornings. Will this ink work?
      Who knows? You didn't say anything about the model and why is anything else relevant? Maybe they think it might impact the ink to have the printer working on wifi. People make these questions so much harder than they need to be. Some are good ones but many are terrible. Generally, the shorter and sweeter the question is, the more likely it can get an answer.

      • I hope somebody answered the Kentuckian with: "Sorry, but that ink is only rated to work Mondays thru Fridays". North Carolina is currently legislating to permit 7-day ink use, and a few other eastern states are debating similar changes for their 2023-2026 agenda"."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Half the time the answer to "will this ink work with my printer?" is "why didn't you buy a laser?"

      I.e. often the answers are just as useless as the questions.

  • It wasn't just the questions (Score:3)

    by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @04:47PM (#61240280)

    The answers sometimes caused either facepalm or aneurysm.

    Hurry Internet Archive. Save this repository of human stupidity!!! /s

  • It's prehistoric Quora .... (Score:4, Funny)

    by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @04:52PM (#61240300) Journal

    It's been a LONG time since I ever thought asking a question over on Yahoo might get me a decent answer. But I've got to say, I subscribed to the daily digest of random questions/answers on Quora and it's typically so interesting or informative, I get sucked into clicking on one of them to read more and wind up burning the next 20-30 minutes reading other items of interest up there.

  • Generations will miss out on the important answers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by E-Lad ( 1262 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @04:59PM (#61240324)

    Yahoo! Answers has provided us with so much knowledge, including answers to burning questions such as: How is babby formed? [youtube.com]

  • What loaded post title and summary (Score:5, Insightful)

    by youn ( 1516637 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @05:04PM (#61240338) Homepage

    Calling all questions on the site stupid is pretty superficial and reflects a pretty limited mindset.

    Sure, some people have odd questions but different people have different gaps in their knowledge. Forums and collaborative sites are a big part of the web, including slashdot, stackoverflow, qora. Are they "Stupid" and "Dubious" too?

    Like the site or not, it was one of the first sites where people could go and ask questions, they were pioneers in gamification of answers and their attempt at helping people was well intentioned.

    The tone of post is quite disappointing though

  • Although it is (was?) notorious for low-quality answers/questions, I feel like it should be said that it wasn't completely useless. I once ate some spicy crunchy triangles filled with peas and potatoes at a party and wanted to know what they were called. So I asked on Yahoo Answers and someone actually informed me that they're called samosas. Keep in mind this was like 10 years ago.

  • How is babby formed?
    How girl get pragnent?
    For those who don't remember the countless memes [arstechnica.com]

  • Slashdot, a repository for stupid comments, lives on.

  • Obligatory example of what TFA is talking about: How is babby formed? [yahoo.com]
    (Yes, this is where the meme started)
  • Quora is still there to enshrine all the bad answers

  • Damn (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @05:41PM (#61240476)

    I'm going to preserve this question [yahoo.com] here as easily one of the best belly laughs the Internet ever delivered.

    My girlfriend's dad recently passed away...how can i help her get past this so i can introduce her to anal?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      >>1 decade ago

      who goes out of their way to code this?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by WallyL ( 4154209 )
        It's just a "relative date" library function. I suppose one could write a more advanced function, to handle "relative dates for 1 year, then just show calendar date."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nazrhyn ( 906126 )
        I can easily imagine myself coding a relative date function and figuring I might as well go up to "century" just in case. It'd be a difference of like 45 seconds of coding.

  • Thanks, I hate it (Score:3, Insightful)

    by paper_sextoy ( 6309050 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @05:46PM (#61240498)

    I know answers is known for the article title but there was other stuff on there. Especially while it was popular. All of that will disappear. What's the replacement? Social media and sites with paywalls. Quora already soft blocks you. Just another part of the internet to turn to dust.

    We are headed for an era of perpetually disappearing history and all that it brings.

    • Wasn't that why torrents were invented? To preserve "history"*?

      *Oh, and "culture", can't forget that too.

  • But how wil I kno if pragnent?!

  • Do way instain mother to pay respects.

  • now that would be informative

  • the thing that wouldn't leave. https://vimeo.com/477679423 [vimeo.com]

  • I don't understand why they should bother shutting this stuff down. It' has to be more popular than much of their services and the cost to upkeep it has to be pretty trivial.

    • "New and richer experiences for our users blah blah blah....,"

      As I've mentioned a few times before here, this is the death knell for what you are used to using, and why you should never rely entirely on "The Cloud".

      Granted I don't think Yahoo is even saying this. More likely the company itself is on it's death bed, and they are trying to shed as many 'frivolous expenses' as they possibly can. I'm amazed they lasted as long as they did. Best case for them I can see is that they get bought out before they die

  • This sub stole AskYahoo's milkshake. It makes Yahoo users look like geniuses.

  • ASCII stupid question... (Score:3, Funny)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @08:30PM (#61240936) Homepage Journal

    ..get a stupid ANSI.

  • Trying to find an an answer to a very vexxing problem only to be met with crap that looks like it was written by a 6 year old.

    "lulz mee too"

    "i'm having the smae problem. Someone e-mail me the answer pls"

    "X is a piece of crap. Why don't you switch to Y"

    If this is what YA is populated with, shutting it down means less garbage/road blocks between me and what I am searching for

  • but I actually had a couple of esoteric questions that I asked on Yahoo Answers. Both of them got answered, which was impressive, because even after exhaustive searching I could not find the information. Both times it was because people who had boots on the ground for the two issues had first hand knowledge. Not saying it isn't a dumpster fire, but it had its place back in the day.

  • May have been a lot of stupid questions on there but it was the only place that helped me remember the movie The Wraith many years ago. Weird that I'm now feeling nostalgia for an interaction I had with strangers regarding something I was feeling nostalgia for at the time.
    I guess this is what getting old feels like...

  • Well, at least the "Babby" post seems to be archived

    http://web.archive.org/web/202... [archive.org]

    (crawl from 2020). With the other post, YMMV

    (Hopefully this isn't just loading some Javashit forum data from the Yahoo servers which will be broken come May)

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