Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021

https://uk.help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN35642.html

by Gaessaki • 5 years ago

585 358 5 years ago

uk.help.yahoo.com

WarOnPrivacy• 5 years ago

Dang. I learned better posting skills at YA. Specifically, I learned to create more concise answers, quickly.

My proving ground was the religious answers group, where I went head to head with the dominant anti-faith trolls.

amyjess• 5 years ago

My main experience with Yahoo! Answers is that it's more of a trolling platform than anything else. The questions are trolls, and the answers are trolls.

Nevertheless, I'm going to miss it. The trolling was fun to read, at least.

judge20202• 5 years ago

https://youtu.be/EShUeudtaFg

ErikVandeWater• 5 years ago

Thank you! This was hilarious!

Do you have any recommendations on how to find more content in this genre (dysfunctional humor / best of dumbest internet content)? It's hard to come up with search terms that would lead me to find this kind of video.

sjcsjc• 5 years ago

https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201009300839...

Best question I'm aware of on Yahoo Answers. And the infinite loop response is the best answer.

CynicusRex• 5 years ago

Haha, the first comment I thought of was “But how will I find out if I'm pregante?”

TedDoesntTalk7• 5 years ago

Did this come before or after the “how babby formed” meme?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-is-babby-formed

userbinator2• 5 years ago

I knew what that would be before I clicked on it.

YA has little value in providing actual answers, but it's a great source of entertainment and possibly even illumination into how a certain subset of the population think.

kmeisthax2• 5 years ago

Except in Japan where it's basically Stack Overflow for some reason

beardedscotsman• 5 years ago

Yahoo Japan was a JV between Yahoo and SoftBank. It’s pretty much a huge if not the biggest platform in Japan because of this. Yahoo Japan is not the same as yahoo globally.

qalmakka• 5 years ago

Japan it's basically it's own little world. Their local version of Yahoo is not only still very popular, but it looks like it's stuck in the early '00s for some inexplicable reason.

henearkr2• 5 years ago

The Japanese version will not be closed. It's called Chiebukuro, and it looks like it will continue as it is: https://chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/

ehsankia• 5 years ago

Is that the experience of someone who actively used it for a period of time or of someone who just heard of it offhandedly. The latter would clearly only hear of the memes and trolling, since those bubble out much more than helpful answers.

mkr-hn5• 5 years ago

My Brother, My Brother and Me shared all the best with a regular roster of volunteer Yahoo miners credited for the questions.

iJohnDoe• 5 years ago

Quick, we need to get Archive.org on the case. /sarcasm

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26703203

news_to_me• 5 years ago

Why sarcasm? Yahoo Answers represents an important slice of online culture from the early 2000s. Are our kids supposed to just believe us when we tell them how babby is formed[1]?

[1] https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080211063124A...

causality0• 5 years ago

Yahoo Answers served as a social network for kids shortly after chatroom culture died. It was particularly the home of underrepresented and oppressed groups, like LGBT youth and minority religions. I spent time there as a teenager and saw a huge number of people ask about things and talk about things they couldn't in real life. Gay kids trying to figure out their place. Muslim kids questioning things they'd been taught. Terrified kids going through a pregnancy scare looking for guidance and reassurance.

That it became an alt-right cesspit is a terrible shame. It was a silly place but it deserves a better place in internet history than that.

dwighttk3• 5 years ago

They’re around... they know you know how babby is formed

IncRnd3• 5 years ago

Are our kids supposed to just believe us when we tell them how babby is formed[1]?

It comes done to how whell you parend the chiyelld. Good parendets explain to the chyelld how babby is achivet.

Animats• 5 years ago

Why is Yahoo even still around? They got rid of search. They got rid of the directory. They sold Alibaba. What are they still doing, if anything?

Verizon may be getting out of content. With antitrust regulation picking up, it's quite likely that telcos will be required to get out of the content business. Historically, the US made movie companies stop owning movie theaters, and car companies stop owning dealers. Although Yahoo is now such a loser that it's hard to make an antitrust case against Verizon owning them. AT&T and DirectTV, though...

bellyfullofbac• 5 years ago

I got my Yahoo Mail address in 1996 because teenage me thought my address @yahoo.com would be so cool. Nowadays I use it just for online shops, etc (I also use it for Facebook, which is a bad idea, because online shops upload their customer info to Facebook and, tada, guess whose profile matches for targetted advertising). Today I logged in and a stupid ad popped up (I wish I can remember what it was for). When I do a password reset on one of these shops, Yahoo also recognizes those kinds of emails and recommends LastPass or whatever password service they bought.

Incidentally, they've also lost all my mail from before year 2001, when I actually use them for personal communications, meaning all those emails are now lost (well maybe I have a backup somewhere...). What a fucking useless company.

dwighttk3• 5 years ago

I helped a person get back into their yahoo mail account and the web interface showed auto playing video ads with sound. I recommended they get a different account or at least use IMAP to check mail, but they were not interested.

abhgh• 5 years ago

I was scrolling down the comments to see if someone has this problem...they lost my mail too. No way to recover it then, huh? This is sad.

twobitshifter2• 5 years ago

There are actually many quality yahoo products, not yahoo sports and yahoo finance are very widely used. Yahoo finance is a mini Bloomberg terminal at this point.

twiddling• 5 years ago

Their fantasy sports platform?

jimbob45• 5 years ago

Shutdown Corner has been my favorite source of reasoned NFL power rankings for the last seven years if that counts for anything.

perardi3• 5 years ago

This would be my gut reaction, but for whatever it’s worth, and however they create this metric: Alexa says they’re #11 in “global internet engagement”.

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com

(Again, whatever that means.)

But I think they have a few valuable properties. Sports. Finance. And for whatever reason, the old folks in my family love their Yahoo Weather app.

lesdeuxmagots• 5 years ago

Yahoo still makes billions in revenue every year. And the vast majority is not from finance or sports.

Baffling to some HN readers perhaps, but Yahoo is still one of the biggest online destinations. It has a DAU count an order of magnitude larger than say Reddit, and it monetizes those users far more effectively.

ravenstine3• 5 years ago

Have anything to back that up? I find it very hard to believe. Even the boomers I know don't ever use it. Is Yahoo popular in some other country?

josefresco• 5 years ago

monetizes those users far more effectively.

Citation needed.

MangoCoffee• 5 years ago

Yahoo as a brand is probably still worth something. Its a grand father from dotcom bubble that people still recognized. Yahoo still provided a lot of services that people use like Yahoo email for example.

ravenstine3• 5 years ago

That's a depreciating item, perhaps rapidly so, now that more and more users aren't people who were alive during the dotcom boom.

m4635• 5 years ago

Yahoo email for example

The only reason I get yahoo email is because there was a vulnerability a few years ago and everyone's account got broken into.

boplicity• 5 years ago

Verizon, as part of their ownership of Yahoo and AOL, controls a significant proportion of email inboxes. There is quite a lot of strategic value in that. They've been particularly bad, from my perspective, in terms of allowing our emails to get through, but I shudder at the thought of email being under 90% control by Google.

m4635• 5 years ago

and no groups.

I think my friend uses it for news.

robotnikman• 5 years ago

I think Yahoo is still relevant in Japan

astrange3• 5 years ago

Yahoo Japan is a separate company. They are definitely still relevant though.

js4ever• 5 years ago

May the 4th be with them forever

marcodiego• 5 years ago

Though I'm not a user and never liked the service myself, I'd like it to be preserved. It is part of internet history. Let's not let happen to answers what happened to geocities.

dwighttk3• 5 years ago

Some things aren’t worth saving.

nine_k2• 5 years ago

Tell that to the future historians.

luhn• 5 years ago

Unfortunately Verizon has shown itself to be unwilling to work with Internet Archive and others that want to preserve this history. When Yahoo Groups shut down couple years ago, Verizon made no effort to help the archival and actually banned accounts that were attempting to scrape data.

https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/yahoo-groups-is-ending-...

DC13502• 5 years ago

Yahoo answers is the reason I was insecure about not having an average 8 inch penis when I was 11 years old. It was probably the lowest quality forum that I’ve ever seen and I’m glad to hear it’s shutting down.

gotostatement• 5 years ago

I am truley sorry for your lots

DC13502• 5 years ago

Thanks

approxim8ion• 5 years ago

and then the penis clapped

mitjak• 5 years ago

how is babby formed

xnx• 5 years ago

The complete endeavor of Yahoo was all worth it for the creation of this video alone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EShUeudtaFg

carols10cents• 5 years ago

how girl get archeived?

vmception• 5 years ago

we need to do way abstain mother

canjobear2• 5 years ago

When I opened the comments the first thing I did was Ctrl-F "babby"

thirtyseven• 5 years ago

Rough year for the McElroys, huh?

twobitshifter2• 5 years ago

The answers idea has been tried by many and it’s the quality of the answers that matters most, but this is presumably out of the developers control. If you have yahoo answers, quora, metafilter, askReddit, and stackoverflow, the primary differences in my mind are the website cultures. Quora has apparently developed a very pro CCP slant lately, not something the developers intended (one hopes.) it also seems to be den of self promotion. Stackoverflow is genuinely useful for experts, but has many memes about the type of answers one can expect to a beginner question. Ask Reddit is not a place that you can expect to get an answer if it’s not interesting enough to gain upvotes or be made fun of. Yahoo answers tried to provide a simple Q&A format, but both the quality of questions and answers were unsatisfying (how is baby formed).

keeganjw• 5 years ago

What does this mean for My Brother, My Brother, and Me... Griffin's gonna be bummed.

easton2• 5 years ago

It had to end sometime, I suppose. Maybe they'll pull a archive somehow.

MivLives• 5 years ago

They have been doing more viewer questions. Or no questions at all recently.

RootReducer• 5 years ago

They've only been doing one or even no Yahoo questions per episode for a while now. I almost suspect this will relieve them and give then an "out" to pivot to different formats.

smoldesu• 5 years ago

It's a sad year for McElroy listeners. Between this and Graduation, I'm not sure there will be anything left after 2021.

spiralganglion• 5 years ago

It means Griffin is going to read a final Yahoo.

alex_g• 5 years ago

Gonna have to archive this one for Franc R's gem of a contribution https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080603191133A...

wyxuan• 5 years ago

In any case I think I agree as Yahoo answers just became a site riddled with bots spamming link shorteners laden with ads. Twas good while it lasted though

Source:

Dude just trust me

endisneigh• 5 years ago

My favorite question on YA

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090226170437A...

com2kid2• 5 years ago

Public libraries aren't a thing in many countries. The reason North America has a tradition of public libraries is that one of the richest men of the 20th century decided to leave behind a legacy of literacy [1]. Prior to that, quite a few protestant groups were big on literacy and invented the idea of public libraries for all.

I have friends from other countries who have told me that libraries in their home countries are indeed commercial, you pay a small fee to rent a book for a fixed period of time. Stories from childhood, so I am not sure if such libraries are still common place in those countries, but the question is most certainly not stupid.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_libraries_in_North_Amer...

space_fountain2• 5 years ago

For one example of this currently, here's what comes up when I search for Amsterdam Public library: https://www.oba.nl/service/word-lid.html (it also matches my memory of walking around the big public library in Amsterdam).

That's $44 a year to checkout up to 50 items (only 6 ebooks) and $1 for every reservation you want to make. For $56 bucks you get unlimited checkout. Its not exactly a huge cost, but still not what I expected based on my experience in the US and my perception of Europe

hkt2• 5 years ago

TIL, that's fascinating. I'm a member of a number of subscription libraries in the UK that predate public libraries and had no idea about Carnegie's role.

The role for subscription based libraries in the UK is usually for specialist nonacademic research, or perhaps just an old community of readers who like things just-so.

Back in the 19th century one of the things mutuals and co-ops used to do in the UK was provide reading rooms, circulating libraries, lectures and such, much like Carnegie's libraries. It was often working class self help rather than liberal philanthropy, too. There's a great history of this (and lots more) in Jonathan Rose's Intellectual History of the British Working Class.

redisman2• 5 years ago

There are also many places with much more expansive libraries. Like the flagship in Helsinki (yes its funny to have a flagship library) https://www.oodihelsinki.fi/en/

brassattax• 5 years ago

Off-topic but I love that the timestamp on that says "1 decade ago"

pmiller23• 5 years ago

Hah, yes. It sort of assumes the page will be around for more than 1 decade, doesn't it?

myself248• 5 years ago

Ugh, I haaaaaaaaaate this habit of masking real timestamps and making them progressively worse.

It _completely_ changes the meaning, if someone asked a question about airplanes on September 10th, 2001 or one day later. Just saying "two decades ago" with no way to reveal the original timestamp removes that context.

It's just one of a whole lot of ways the modern web goes out of its way to get in my way.

MiddleEndian4• 5 years ago

I liked https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091211104107A...

robbyking• 5 years ago

"They need to do way instain mother who kill their babbys."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/how-i...

blackearl2• 5 years ago

My go to - 2 minutes of pregnancy questions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EShUeudtaFg

ryan-allen• 5 years ago

Follow it up with 2 minutes of Ouija board questions! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15nNY7uofNw

unnouinceput• 5 years ago

Yeah, that's a classic troll right there. Absolutely none is that stupid.

thinkafterbef• 5 years ago

4.1M clicks about to go down. https://i.imgur.com/0pxHInh.png

tyingq2• 5 years ago

And a bunch of scrapers trying to make a copies of it with lots of terrible domain name ideas.

jdlyga• 5 years ago

Yahoo gets rid of some of their best services. Yahoo Geolocation Service, besides Google which was license restricted, was the most accurate service for putting in an address and getting latitude/longitude coordinates. But they sadly shut it down.

I sure hope they don't shut down Yahoo Finance. It's the best thing that Yahoo currently has.

calvinmorrison• 5 years ago

How about the treasure trove that was geocities?

jethro_tell• 5 years ago

my stocks widget says that it's switching off finance (probably API?) next update because it's being discontinued. I have not validated that. I mostly use alpha vantage for my own projects now since finance (API) was down for a while.

kristianc2• 5 years ago

Yahoo gets rid of some of their best services.

This was not one of them.

echelon2• 5 years ago

The most memorable thing from Yahoo Answers is the "how is babby formed" meme.

It never attracted high quality Q&A, and was a joke from day one.

challengly• 5 years ago

Yeah, though it was their funniest service.

TedDoesntTalk7• 5 years ago

The mismanagement of yahoo/oath/Verizon assets has been stunning. What a waste. Marissa Meyer started it. Her exit and the Verizon acquisition accelerated it. Now they are a husk of early web properties when they could have been an Amazon with the right leadership.

perardi3• 5 years ago

Oh, I wouldn’t start that downfall during Marissa Meyer’s reign of error.

Remember when Yahoo hired a CEO who lied about having a CS degree?

https://money.cnn.com/2012/05/13/technology/yahoo-ceo-out/in...

koboll• 5 years ago

I don't really understand the argument here. How is sunsetting Answers related to mismanagement?

Seems like Answers, as cool and interesting and funny as it was, was probably not a major revenue driver or even loss leader anymore for Yahoo. Seems like it'd be an obvious candidate for being cut, as a deadweight project that siphons engineering time from initiatives that actually make money.

Sure, it's sad that it's going away. But Yahoo isn't a charity, it's a corporation, and "jettison projects that cost money and focus instead on projects that make money" seems like one of the most basic tenets of managing a business.

Like, I totally get the argument that when Yahoo or Google or whoever shuts down one of their services it's an annoyance for users. No doubt. But I don't understand how it's a sign of "mismanagement".

laurent92• 5 years ago

I don’t understand what Yahoo is supposed to be. Suddenly in 2015, they have the genius step of publishing an email UI on paar with Gmail, as they should have done about 10 years earlier. But unless you are using their email, what _is_ Yahoo? For me it is a weather widget and a news feed. Not counting Yahoo Finance because other comments say it’s shutting down. So what is the core business of Yahoo? A news corp that repeats Reuters, but without the TV front-end that CNN has, and without the journalists that the Washington Post has?

Fordec• 5 years ago

Meyer didn't start it, but she did put distinctly more marketing and hype into her role than predecessors which shone a brighter spotlight on the already ensuing downfall. I'd be more inclined to pinpoint the start of it to sometime around Jerry Yang's departure and the revolving door of CEOs between him and Mayer when their tenure was more akin to flailing than building leadership.

rchaud2• 5 years ago

I wouldn't put it all on her. Back in 2008, Yahoo refused a $44b acquisition offer from Microsoft.

A few years later they acquired LinkedIn for around that much, and that's definitely been more successful than most of what Yahoo offers now.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-idUSWNAS8942200...

com2kid2• 5 years ago

Completely off topic: That is the longest list of "framework partners" that I have ever denied access to.

There are 400 (!!!) "partners" listed just for personalized ads!

SteveGerencser• 5 years ago

Just think of all those low quality links placed there for SEO reasons that are about to vanish.

tyingq2• 5 years ago

I do miss Yahoo! Pipes. I don't believe I'll miss Yahoo! Answers though. The questions they are curating on the front page are still terrible ones.

softwaredoug• 5 years ago

I do think it's interesting that we call the Web the "repository of human knowledge" when clearly everything is temporary, and you'd do better to buy a book on most subjects.

(Not that I am complaining about it, I just think we should disabuse ourselves of this notion.)

OakNinja• 5 years ago

Yahoo’s problem is mainly that they don’t seem to know how to get paid and what to get paid for.

They run a popular service for free for years and then shut it down because they don’t make any money.

ravenstine3• 5 years ago

Finally! Although search engines have finally deranked Yahoo Answers, I still resent it for all the years when I would look up something and the top results always included a Yahoo Answer written by a 12 year old. It's pretty much a warehouse of misinformation to such a degree that it makes Quora look like Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of credibility.

DC-3• 5 years ago

Hey! My brother used to write answers to maths questions on Yahoo Answers when he was 12 and they were quite good, I think :-)

umvi• 5 years ago

still resent it for all the years when I would look up something and the top results always included a Yahoo Answer written by a 12 year old

Reminds me of the famous(ish) meme that came from Yahoo Answers: https://youtu.be/Ll-lia-FEIY

simias2• 5 years ago

I'm partial to this one myself: https://youtu.be/EShUeudtaFg

pmiller23• 5 years ago

At least you could actually read the answers, unlike, say, expertsexchange.com

markdown2• 5 years ago

it makes Quora look like Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of credibility.

Have you looked recently? Quora is mostly online marketers. Only marginally better than 12yr olds.

duskwuff2• 5 years ago

That's the point. The content on Yahoo Answers is so bad that it makes Quora look relatively authoritative by contrast.

m4635• 5 years ago

reminds me of the "ask a..." from the onion.

for example: https://www.theonion.com/ask-a-navy-seal-1819583375

or a more pertinent one:

https://www.theonion.com/ask-a-high-school-student-who-didnt...

pdimitar• 5 years ago

Will there be an archive somewhere?

mkr-hn5• 5 years ago

People joke like "ha-ha, let it burn!" but it's the ordinary folks and their creations that anthropologists desire most. Ancient graffiti in Rome tells you more about ancient Rome than privileged writings of the era.

Yahoo Answers matters more to culture than any New York Times trend piece.

acwan93• 5 years ago

I wonder if in another 400 years some distant society will look at ours as the "Dark Ages" since all information is locked behind services that have since disappeared like Yahoo Answers, Geocities, AIM profiles, MySpace, and (maybe) Facebook.

Ekaros• 5 years ago

I wonder how much of early web we have already lost. All of the forums, user generated content and so on just gone...

koolba• 5 years ago

The real problem of the proletariat is not being able to permanently delete their comments.

kristianc2• 5 years ago

Unlikely. Far more (printed) books are being published today than at any previous time in human history - certainly more so than in the Dark Ages where most had neither the equipment nor the education to write.

And that’s before you include the likes of Wikipedia, which it’s inconceivable won’t be recorded in at least some form. We will have a pretty good record of our civilization to work with - down to the minutest cultural ephemera.

https://ourworldindata.org/books

nonbirithm• 5 years ago

I had only recently thought about this when YouTube announced they were hiding the video dislike count. Killing off Yahoo Answers is far worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26654258

Phrases like "the algorithm" have started showing up in all kinds of videos and texts, not just in tech-centric ones. They had to, now that said algorithm is tied to the ability of certain people to make money and survive. The effect that Big Tech has on our lives and on human history is becoming more and more profound.

thaumasiotes2• 5 years ago

Ancient graffiti in Rome tells you more about ancient Rome than privileged writings of the era.

This just isn't true, for the simplest possible reason: there's more preserved literature than there is preserved graffiti. It also isn't true for the slightly less simple reason that the literature covers a much wider range of topics.

What historians desire most is driven by what they don't have now. Cuneiform tablets are so numerous that they mostly just sit around untranslated. Would they be informative if we did translate them? Of course, but the manpower isn't there. Identical documents from 3rd-century Germany would be an epic, multiple-career-making find. Those would be translated immediately.

We value things the same way. Yahoo Answers is worthless to us because we have infinite amounts of similar material, so there's no cost to destroying this subset of it.

You could try to argue that Yahoo Answers has great future value, and we should therefore preserve it, but if we followed that advice, Yahoo Answers would have no future value, because so much content like it would have been preserved. This approach fails to be logically coherent.

simias2• 5 years ago

They're both valuable. In linguistics for instance graffiti can tell you things about the language and its evolution that the formal language won't communicate, like how certain letters stop being pronounced or become pronounced differently. Or how some grammatical constructions shift for instance.

esturk• 5 years ago

I'm not sure that statement is true. Given just one OR the other, which would you pick? Graffiti, or random chatter/expression by extension, is useful as an addition to privileged writing which serves as a backbone to the events of history. Without the latter, the former isn't nearly as interesting.

Take Native American culture for example. If we could, we would prefer actual historical events written down than just stories that's pass down through word of mouth.

perardi3• 5 years ago

If by “ordinary folks” you mean “spam bots”, then yes, our anthropologist weakly godlike artificial intelligences will appreciate this catalog.

mkr-hn5• 5 years ago

Spam bots are one half of the decades-long battle between people looking for a quick buck and people trying to communicate. It's a huge part of the story of the last few decades of technology. It's right up there with the push and pull of progress of weapons and armor technology. How could that not be valuable?

Jakobeha• 5 years ago

Afaik that's what the internet archive is for. Hopefully they archive all of the content before it goes down.

terse_malvolio• 5 years ago

When multiple parrot the same 'how is babby formed' meme it makes me think the forum has been invaded by bird people simply echoing the songs they know. Maybe birds and humans aren't so different after all. Squawk?

Curious what answers HN found interesting? Algolia Search: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fanswers.yahoo.com%2F

aviraldg• 5 years ago

Does this include Yahoo Answers Japan (which I believe is still quite active)?

henearkr2• 5 years ago

No, it seems like Chiebukuro (the Japanese version of Yahoo Answers) is not ending.

At least, on their front page they do not hint at any such intention: https://chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/

justplay• 5 years ago

Although I don't use it, hearing that Yahoo Answers is shutting down, I am upset. It feels like the internet became an utterly different place.

unixhero• 5 years ago

They don't list the reason for *why*

themadprogramer• 5 years ago

Am I pregant? That will be all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgckQGnFEAI

particulars02• 5 years ago

but....HOW IS BABBY FORMED?

vforvendettador• 5 years ago

It's been long superseded by various similar platform. I used to use Yahoo Answers in their heyday but the quality of questions and answers never up to scratch and it's a spiral down to obscurity.

didip2• 5 years ago

Random trivia: Larry Page's brother Carl Page sold eGroups to Yahoo for $432 million which then turned into Yahoo Answers.

neonate• 5 years ago

You mean Yahoo Groups, yes? Also shut down recently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGroups

didip2• 5 years ago

ooo that’s right. I somehow thought Yahoo Answers evolved from Yahoo Groups.

GormanFletcher• 5 years ago

For read-heavy content sites like Yahoo Answers, I wonder why they get shut down instead of getting compiled into pregenerated static HTML and hosted as read-only.

mkr-hn5• 5 years ago

Speculation: Penny pinching executives cutting costs as much as they can to juice profits before turning the ship toward another sale.

Someone1234• 5 years ago

You could throw a few ad scripts on them and even make a little money (likely more than the tiny hosting costs for static content).

I agree: Strange choice. But as is the world of large corporations and decision-making.

ericbarrett• 5 years ago

This would still be an ongoing product that would need integration into the current ad networks; security reviews; patches to the servers; OS upgrades; legal support (copyright, abuse, and right-to-be-forgotten claims); accessibility support; and probably a few other things I can't think of. It could be done, maybe for a profit, but how big a profit? My guess is any potential advocate inside Yahoo! has bigger fish to fry.

1123581321• 5 years ago

A couple Yahoo product shutdowns supposedly happened because no one wanted to touch the code anymore. I’ve seen the same thing in much smaller product companies—the Elm app, the old Rails app after all the Ruby developers left, etc.

CobrastanJorji2• 5 years ago

My bet would be that no management at Yahoo wanted to own that. It'd just be a slow down-and-to-the-right graph over time. There'd be absolutely no upside to having your name attached to the project, and any engineer who volunteered who be stuck maintaining it forever with no hope of promotion.

Sure, it's probably millions of dollars per year that they're throwing out by not keeping it passively online, so it'd be in the company's interest, but with apologies to Mitt Romney, corporations aren't people. If something isn't advantageous to at least one individual decision maker, it won't happen.

bhupy4• 5 years ago

corporations aren't people. If something isn't advantageous to at least one individual decision maker, it won't happen.

By this logic, no collection of people can be considered "people". Indians aren't people, men aren't people, etc etc. As an Indian man, I find that idea absurd.

Unanimity isn't a prerequisite for personhood in the context of whether or not the rights extended to individuals disappear the moment those individuals act as an association/group. Corporations are people because they are groups of people.

Jeff_Brown• 5 years ago

Then why not sell it?

duskwuff2• 5 years ago

And, from what I'm seeing on the Answers home page, a lot of the popular content is rather time-sensitive (like questions about ongoing political controversies). A lot of traffic would drop off very quickly if the site went static.

aerosmile7• 5 years ago

It likely has to do with a tech stack that's being retired or some other technologically-driven forcing function (authentication, security, etc).

Edit: my bootstrapped company was acquired by a much larger corporation and produced material EBITDA for 10 years, even in the year when it was shut down. Why was it shut down? Because it was written in PHP and the corporation was not going to support that tech stack anymore.

Analogy from the automotive world [0]:

the $10m McLaren F1’s software can only run on a Compaq LTE 5280. The reason being that they run on an installed, bespoke CA card. This CA card is the interface that communicates between the laptop and the car. Of course, since the software was developed in 1992, it should be no surprise that it’s DOS based.

[0] https://seilevel.com/requirements/11318-2

patrickaljord2• 5 years ago

but with apologies to Mitt Romney, corporations aren't people

I agree corporations are not people but then why are they taxed instead of just the people? This whole country was founded on the principle of "no taxation without representation". Any people or organization being taxed will try to influence politics to improve their tax bill. There is no way around that.

You can have corporate taxes or you can have politics with no corporation meddling but you cannot and will never get both as people who own these corporations will always try to lobby politics one way or another in favor of the corporations.

xwdv• 5 years ago

I don't give a fuck about promotion. If Yahoo gave me a decent salary I'd maintain it forever. If I want more money I don't wait for promotions, I quit and find a better job. Jobs are just a way to funnel money into my investment portfolio which is the real money maker here.

crazygringo• 5 years ago

Sure, it's probably millions of dollars per year that they're throwing out

The reality of it is probably not, actually. Not when you consider the full cost of running it -- not just the engineers maintaining it, but the extra complexity of perhaps outdated technology (can make it harder for other teams to move forward, to migrate servers, etc.), and especially important the time spent by management in managing its continued existence.

And the management aspect is less about their salaries and more about what more profitable things they're not focusing on instead. You might say "well just hire another manager" but that manager has to be managed. Ultimately the CEO and board only have a finite amount of time to review projects and monitor performance, and otherwise even mildly profitable projects no longer become worth it when the cost of them being a distraction to management is taken into account.

slugiscool99• 5 years ago

Looks like it was could have been political reasons? See https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20210405224547A...

whatyesaid• 5 years ago

I think Yahoo Answers was highly indexed by Google in like 2010.

But for years now, I've never seen a Yahoo Answers link in my search results. You have things like Reddit now highly indexed which has far less silly answers and questions through actually having moderation.

I doubt its getting much traffic, and if it is, it's probably providing a bad look to the brand.

adolph• 5 years ago

A “bad look” to the “Yahoo!” brand? Their “brand look” has been value destruction for more than 15 years, hitting their stride early with 2005’s acqui-trashing of upcomly, del.icio.us and Flickr.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...!

unreal37• 5 years ago

In fact, the Google Search team has made changes to their algorithm over the years SPECIFICALLY to reduce crowdsourced answers sites from appearing in search results. It's a conscious decision.

byset• 5 years ago

I do remember often being frustrated when mostly useless Yahoo Answers content would appear at the top of Google search results. I never understood why it was ranked so highly. YA seemed like what Quora would be like if you were required to flunk a literacy test in order to participate.

blackearl2• 5 years ago

Are there any real answers of value on there? I know there's plenty of hilarious questions like the classic "how is babby formed?" but I wouldn't ever consider Yahoo! Answers a legitimate source for anything.

redisman2• 5 years ago

I think the only value they generated was a couple of funny Something Awful articles and Flash animations

scottmcleod• 5 years ago

Bad management/uninformed...Who the hell works at Yahoo?

kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj• 5 years ago

Because there is a fuck ton of misinformation and outright incorrect info

Spivak• 5 years ago

Otherwise known as a community Q/A site.

WalterBright• 5 years ago

I've been doing that for years to generate static web pages from the D newsgroups:

https://digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index.html

It's got 20 years of content. No Javascript, just plain html.

It came in really handy when I wrote the history of the D programming language paper.

peter303• 5 years ago

Verizon is winnowing low profit yahoo software.

londons_explore• 5 years ago

It remains a liability forever. You can never make it read-only because even 20 years from now someone will be sending your legal team take down requests because they don't agree with what 9 year old themselves wrote next to their real name...

LocalH2• 5 years ago

Such is the unintended (?) consequence of the "right to be forgotten"

llacb47• 5 years ago

Sad. Yahoo no longer wants to be responsible for hosting any UGC, they would rather sell ads.

water8• 5 years ago

UGC is what keeps yahoo alive. It's definitely not the journalism.

astockwell• 5 years ago

"...and thousands of physics/chemistry students all cried out at once, and then were silenced."

hota_mazi• 5 years ago

Oh no! How are new generations going to learn how babbies are formed?

tomaszs• 5 years ago

It is sad to hear Yahoo didn't take responsible steps to preserve the content of the service for future generations.

It is a historical part of the Internet that should be available for research. I think there should be a law to force companies to move public data to public domain and make it available to download.

Otherwise we just loose history of our times chunk by chunk. This is unprecedenced taking into an account it was never easier to backup and store such pieces of public data.

bliteben• 5 years ago

Looking back Yahoo is going to seem like an elaborate scam to extract money from stockholders.

windowshopping• 5 years ago

First they came for GeoCities, and I didn't say anything because I don't use GeoCities. Then they came for AIM, and I didn't say anything because I don't use AIM. Then they came for Yahoo Answers, and I didn't say anything because I don't use Yahoo Answers. Then they came for an app I cared about, and there was nobody left to say anything.

Safety1stClyde• 5 years ago

What did you want them to say?

nicbou• 5 years ago

"I'm moving to reddit!"

aerovistae• 5 years ago

It was just a joke, I didn't really mean anything.

alsarea3• 5 years ago

Does Yahoo have an app that you care about?

aerosmile7• 5 years ago

I still remember all the Techcrunch posts in 2006 when it became clear that Yahoo Answers was beating Google Answers [0]. Back then, Google was killing Yahoo in the same way that Amazon is killing Walmart today - very publicly and brutally, despite Walmart (and back then Yahoo) putting on a brave face and telling everyone that it can avoid the inevitable. So when Yahoo scored a tiny little victory, they celebrated it like it was the beginning of a new era. I imagine that Walmart would do the same today if the public gave them credit for building a better automated CX bot or scoring some other interesting but immaterial win.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2006/11/30/yahoos-big-win/

TameAntelope2• 5 years ago

Amazon is killing Walmart?

aerosmile7• 5 years ago

I didn't realize that was up for debate. But I suppose in 2006, not everyone agreed that Google was killing Yahoo ("but what about their xyz, it's so much better than Google's xyz!!!").

In the last 5 years alone, AMZN grew 4x faster than WMT. For two direct competitors with a 4x difference in growth rate, how do you think the story ends?

joshspankit2• 5 years ago

We have ‘how is prangent formed’, so if we’re not getting a static copy at least I know the diamond that was created from it will continue on forever.

jebeng• 5 years ago

I believe it's:

How is babby formed?
how is babby formed
how girl get pragnent

Let's at least try to preserve this gem accurately for future archaeologists. It should make it easier for future humans to wrap their heads around why we are in the state we're in.

joshspankit2• 5 years ago

I mean sure if we want to go back to the origins, but personally I like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EShUeudtaFg

aerosmile7• 5 years ago

AuntKatie will be disappointed - she wrote 143k answers.

https://answers.yahoo.com/activity/questions?show=sjRwIxRCaa

PiRho3141• 5 years ago

Not only that, but her answers were "in memory of ...[of her husband], a gentle spirit, and in memory of my father, mother, aunts, uncles, friends, and many others who have lost the cancer battle."

Way to hit the feelers.

echelon2• 5 years ago

This is heartbreaking, especially if you think about all the people like her. And your own family.

All of it about to be annihilated...

We're so transient, all that we love, experience, and care about. It hurts.

seiferteric• 5 years ago

Gunna miss those classic Ken M Answers as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_M

mb_72• 5 years ago

Ironically, considering the amount of sentiment being displayed here, Ken M is quoted as saying "I was appalled by the Yahoo comment section. It was such a toxic, shitty space." in this interview:

https://redditblog.com/2015/10/03/ken-m-interview-internet-t...

brutal_chaos_• 5 years ago

Maybe this will be helpful: https://github.com/buren/wayback_archiver

surround• 5 years ago

Despite it's infamy, Yahoo Answers was the largest Q&A website for a long time and is a huge part of our digital heritage. Soon, it will be gone forever. The ArchiveTeam will be doing all they can back up as much as possible before it's too late, but IP address rate-limiting is a huge roadblock. If you want to help, download the ArchiveTeam Warrior and run it in the background. It doesn't use a ton of resources - they just need more IP addresses.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior

cormorant• 5 years ago

I'm willing to donate my IP address, but is this active or is it still being set up? I downloaded the Warrior but don't see Yahoo Answers as an available project.

ajayyy2• 5 years ago

It is not active yet. If you select "recommended project", then it will probably switch when the time comes. For now, it is reddit.

Check http://chat.efnet.org:9090/?channels=%23noanswers for updates.

agumonkey• 5 years ago

oh interesting, I'll try to contribute too.

judge20202• 5 years ago

Note: ArchiveTeam is not the same people as archive.org, however, the results will indeed eventually end up on archive.org (since archive.org takes donated WARC data). More at https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Internet_Archive#Back...

unityByFreedom2• 5 years ago

Hold on, who is behind https://archiveteam.org?

Folks, careful what extensions you add.

MichaelApproved2• 5 years ago

I’d like to contribute but I’m nervous about allowing random content to be downloaded through my connection.

Does anyone happen to know what safeguards exist to protect against random child porn or other illegal content from flowing through my connection?

I checked the site but didn’t see anything address this concern.

My fear is the archive grabs a page that happens to have nefarious content which I’d be legally on the hook for.

Am I being overly cautious or is there a genuine risk?

ajayyy2• 5 years ago

If you choose the Yahoo Answers project, it will only be downloading stuff from Yahoo Answers

sellyme5• 5 years ago

Am I being overly cautious or is there a genuine risk?

You're being overly cautious. There is no legal risk in viewing a Yahoo! Answers page (or any other ArchiveTeam Warrior recommended project for that matter).

Wingy• 5 years ago

It’s the same as looking at the pages directly in a browser. A browser also caches images it sees in most cases.

Jarwain• 5 years ago

I think that Technically it's possible, If for some reason Yahoo Answers had illegal content that was never reported and moderated away. I think thats pretty unlikely, though; I'd expect yahoo to be pretty on top of moderation if only due to liability reasons

Alternatively, the collection code could do something weird or suspicious, but it's open source and the team has a good reputation/enough social proof leading me to consider that unlikely

xnyan• 5 years ago

If I sent you a link to a yahoo answers page, would you worry about the legal repercussions of opening it?

Dma54rhs• 5 years ago

Is living on knees like that really worth it? Find your hacker spirit.

tijuco23• 5 years ago

Ok, I have my machine set up, but the project you're asking us to help with isn't available.

sellyme5• 5 years ago

Selected "recommended project", that will default over to Yahoo! Answers as soon as the project has been tested enough to push to all of the Warriors.

thinkloop• 5 years ago

It doesn't use a ton of resources - they just need more IP addresses.

Aren't you also providing 100% of the resources if they are using your IP, or is there a way for them to do most of the work "behind" your IP?

sellyme5• 5 years ago

Aren't you also providing 100% of the resources if they are using your IP

100% of what resources? Bandwidth, yes - you need to download the answers and then upload them to the archive. Fortunately it compresses fantastically so the uploads are fairly inconsequential. Even more fortunately, Yahoo! Answers is text-based, making the bandwidth usage pretty minor compared to almost any other past Archive Team project. It's really the overhead of each individual network request that they're trying to outsource here.

But for storage? You're providing approximately 0% of that. Files are only stored on your device for long enough for your computer to hand them off to a more permanent home at archive.org. CPU usage is also very minimal - again, thanks to text compressing super easily, the compression settings don't need to be particularly aggressive.

moonbug2• 5 years ago

Phew. good to know future generations will still be able to find out how babby is made.

apples_oranges• 5 years ago

You seem convinced that there is no good content on Yahoo Answers..

Sohcahtoa822• 5 years ago

And how to find out if u can get...𝓹𝓻𝓮𝓰𝓪𝓷𝓽𝓮

lucb1e• 5 years ago

The project is active as of 5 minutes ago, for anyone wishing to contribute.

The projection given on IRC was "There's no way we'll get them all" and "assuming 150 million items, we need to go ~5 times what we are now" so help is appreciated!

dan15• 5 years ago

I've got several spare VPSes that are currently just idling, so I'll see if I can donate them to this cause.

userbinator2• 5 years ago

When will I get my Yahoo Answers content? Our team works as fast as possible to make data available, but it can take up to 30 days to receive your content download.

This sadly reminds me of what happened with the Yahoo Groups shutdown.

ataylor32• 5 years ago

There have been multiple links to the "how is prangent formed" video, but let's not forget about the "Curse of The Weggy Board" video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15nNY7uofNw

anonytrary• 5 years ago

Will they at least keep existing pages up as static content for historical and archival purposes? Yahoo Answers had some really useful comments on it.

Your Yahoo Answers data download will return all user-generated content including your Questions list, Questions, Answers list, Answers, and any images. You won't be able to download other users' content, questions, or answers.

I guess not. Shame.

maininformer• 5 years ago

This reminds me of a couple of cute Yahoo! answers story.

In a past life I was misplaced by the high schools sorting-hat counselor into the house of civil engineering. I was motivated and so our Hydrology professor made me the TA for his Hydraulics class.

He would give me questions with no answers to go through in my sections. The questions were damn hard and I would sometimes ask them on Yahoo! answers and this particular guy from India would always come and answer them meticulously and write integrals using unholy script like: int(a,b)Sin x dx and such and I would happily decode them for half an hour before trying to understand the solution. Fun times.

A similar guy helped me a lot when I was learning C. Hey Manjunath! if you're reading this thanks I'm a software engineer now.

sn_master• 5 years ago

Few university assignments I had ended up on Yahoo! Answers too.

realchucknorris• 5 years ago

i hope Manjunath reads this. he would be very proud

cung• 5 years ago

Why is person-to-person knowledge being replaced with company-to-person?

I recall in the 90’s and 00’s being able to google anything and find an answer on a forum or Yahoo Answers. Now all that is last and all google queries return spam sites with bad answers and tons of ads.

visarga• 5 years ago

Google came up with pagerank, that made developers do one of two things - ignore it or start SEO-ing their websites. Over the years, the original sites were replaced with SEO enhanced sites, which are often salads of links and keywords.

sub7• 5 years ago

Quora will be them as well, nobody has figured out how to maintain question/answer quality at scale

Simple up/down voting systems are too easily gamed

itsbits• 5 years ago

One of top contributers I see is . (dot)

Yes. Just dot in symbol.

https://answers.yahoo.com/activity/questions?show=AA11447210

sadfev• 5 years ago

No! They were such a cesspool and also internet history!

imvetri• 5 years ago

Train AI on its data. There wont be a need for archiving.

hkt2• 5 years ago

how is singgularritty formed

tijuco23• 5 years ago

That is so sad. Long time ago I was addicted to answer I.T stuff there. This website was a great idea!

whenlambo• 5 years ago

Being always inspired by online communication, I’ve recently launched casual Q&A website https://ffun.io

teekert2• 5 years ago

Oh no! We may loose this gem [0], thankfully we have the internet archive.

[0] https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201210302242...

stefs• 5 years ago

without yahoo answers this gem wouldn't have been possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EShUeudtaFg

teekert2• 5 years ago

Ah, I revisit that once every couple of years and it is about that time, always puts a smile on my face.

GolDDranks• 5 years ago

I was scared that the Japanese version, Yahoo Chiebukuro would shut down also, but at least at the moment it seems to be only the English version that's shutting down.

Yahoo Chiebukuro is an indispensable resource for me every time I want to ask stupid questions or see candid answers about Japanese culture / way of thinking.

languagehacker• 5 years ago

Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021?

AlwaysRock• 5 years ago

This feel very similar to IMDB shutting down their forums. Did I use the service very often? No. Was the service even very good? Not really. Do I want it to exist? Absolutely.

racl101• 5 years ago

The weirdest questions that you wouldn't ask on Quora ended up there. Like if you were interested in dating your first cousin for example lol.

bobbydreamer• 5 years ago

To sad to see Y!A go. Quora used to be great 5yrs back now it's a shit. I get notifications of post like "I am earning $250k don't know what to do with my life", really. It's just essays of self boasting....

Y!A was precise in lots of things. They should have just reinvented, u mean just change the webdesign and restarted it.

Yahoo has lots of bests not sure why they are falling. Yeah they made really bad acquisitions, but it can be re-engineered to work.

tzs• 5 years ago

Quora used to be great 5yrs back now it's a shit. I get notifications of post like "I am earning $250k don't know what to do with my life", really. It's just essays of self boasting....

The daily digest Quora sends me almost always has a couple interesting questions or so with informative answers for me. It never had ones like you describe.

I wonder why we are getting such different questions/answers?

betwixthewires• 5 years ago

I remember spending unhealthy amounts of time on that site in my 20s. I don't know why I did it. Friends would tell me "just use reddit" and eventually I did (for a time, no longer).

Ive got to say though, good riddance.

pknerd• 5 years ago

I wonder whether robots.txt of Yahoo answers have links available?

13daug• 5 years ago

Really

roguson• 5 years ago

I will surely miss Yahoo Answers! It will indeed become part of our digital history. Throughout my internet journey, I have learned and laughed a lot in the Yahoo Answers section. A lot of people will surely miss this.

gpvos2• 5 years ago

Yahoo has made the decision to shut down Yahoo Answers. To better assist you with this transition we've compiled a list of questions.

Love it.

Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021

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