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Apr 25, 2021 · She declined to comment on the choice to pull down Yahoo Answers entirely, rather than archiving it. After almost 30 years in business, Yahoo has come to be known as a straight-up villain ...
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After 15 years of providing the internet with endless humor and the answers to our burning questions, Yahoo Answers will shut down on May 4.
Long before Reddit became the front page of the internet or Quora was the go-to answer forum, Yahoo Answers provided an entire generation with a sense of community through shared questions. Though the service experienced both good and bad times, experts say this truly marks the end of an internet era.
"Yahoo Answers were a remnant of a time that is already well behind us; a time when search results weren’t Google search results by default when they were a lifelike mix of human knowledge, curiosity, and ignorance," wrote Mark Coster, owner and chief editor of STEM Toy Expert, to Lifewire in an email.
At its core, Yahoo Answers helped people find solutions to their problems or questions, whether it was finding out how to work a lawnmower or more of the now-viral questions like "What happen when get pergenat?" or "How do you make a weeji board?"
Alex Perkins, the co-founder of All the Stuff, described Yahoo Answers as "a sanctuary for the confused."
There wasn’t an omniscient, AI-powered algorithm that would sift through websites and serve you the most relevant ones (or the highest bidders, for that matter).
"It was a place where you could ask anything, even the weirdest of questions that people were probably too afraid to ask in real life," Perkins wrote to Lifewire in an email.
"Way before there were Snapchat and TikTok, it was Yahoo Answers that provided us with this amazing window into the life of other people."
Others say Yahoo Answers was one of the first, and possibly the last, positive community spaces of the internet before social media turned online communities into trolling, misinformation, and comparing yourself to others.
However, since it required no expertise, Yahoo Answers often led to ignorance, misinformation, and trolling. Before cyberbullying and trolling were even coined terms, Yahoo Answers was one of the first online spaces to allow these things to happen, paving the way for an entire culture of online bullies to thrive.
"I remember Yahoo Answers being used as an early form of cyberbullying when I was in high school," wrote Fraser Barker, editor at Wilderness Redefined, to Lifewire.
"Some kids would post mean questions about others and share it around the school."
And while the posts like, "Can you get pregnant from a hot tub?" are fun to laugh at, Simone Dyankoff, a public relations manager at My Speech Class, said that these types of questions were very telling of the failure of the education system.
"[Yahoo Answers] exposed glaring holes in reproductive health education, mental health support, and counseling in schools," Dyankoff wrote to Lifewire in an email.
However, as flawed and outdated as it might have been, Yahoo Answers will forever go down as an important part of the internet, and it will be missed.
Apr 13, 2021 · Tuesday 13 April 2021 16:25 BST. Comments. (REUTERS) Yahoo Answers, the infamous question-and-answer site started in 2005, is finally being closed down. “While Yahoo Answers war once a key part ...
Apr 11, 2021 · Transcript. Yahoo! Answers is shutting down in May. From sex education to homework help, users of the forum remember how it shaped early Internet culture. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: An online ...
May 4, 2021 · Even so, Yahoo Answers didn't exist for its own sake -- it was created to help bolster Yahoo Search results. ... Yahoo Answers was never really about the answers, which could be why the service ...
Apr 5, 2021 · A note sent to active Yahoo Answers members provides a little more detail as to why Yahoo is shutting down the platform, including that “it has become less popular over the years” and that the ...
Apr 6, 2021 · On May 4th, Yahoo Answers will enter a permanent read-only mode and functionally cease to exist. We may never know how babby is formed. A public good mutated into yet another exhausting ...
