The closure of Yahoo Answers will not affect your Yahoo account or other Yahoo services. Perhaps the shutdown is for the best, considering the site appears to be overrun with far-right conspiratorial garbage.
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YouTube Instagram Adobe. Kickstarter Tumblr Art Club. Film TV Games. Yahoo Answers became notorious as a home for a very specific brand of chaos. Some questions became famous memes unto themselves. Others became standards on "top ten funniest" Yahoo Answers questions. Famous podcasters used Yahoo Answers as a source for inspiration too: Dissecting weird questions was a regular segment on My Brother, My Brother and Me. Entertain your brain with the coolest news from streaming to superheroes, memes to video games.
When Yahoo launched its question-and-answer platform in , becoming a mainstay of internet comedy wasn't part of the plan. The company billed the service as "a place where people can ask each other questions on any topic, and get answers by sharing facts, opinions and personal experiences. It can be easy to forget how influential Yahoo once was.
It was a big company with social communities, email, directories and, of course, the biggest search engine in the world. In , however it was facing fierce competition. The hope was that Yahoo Answers could make the company's search engine better by offering users millions of crowdsourced answers to any question they might have.
Platform," Lehman Brothers analyst Douglas Anmuth told Forbes shortly after the service launched , "and create monetization opportunities through additional sponsored links and page views.
Yahoo Answers was never really about the answers, which could be why the service was best known for the questions its users asked. Regardless of what Yahoo Answers was designed to be, it's best known for the surprising and ridiculous questions people asked it. In fact, before news broke of the shutdown, most searches for Yahoo Answers on Google, YouTube and other platforms brought back lists of absurd and amusing ponderings.
There are dozens of comedy videos mocking Yahoo Answers' weirdest questions, and teasing these often too-personal questions will forever be a part of the service's legacy. Wikipedia is exemplary, but it is a few-to-many service: a tight group of writers and editors disseminating the information they think is important.
GitHub is a collaborative forum, but it is highly specialized, catering just to coders; it also offers layers of paid services. And the slow, sure creep of the worst human tendencies through the most popular social or collaborative web sites feels like a failure for our species.
Answers could have been simple, quiet and helpful. And it was, for a while. Then we wrecked it. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz. More from Quartz About Quartz. Follow Quartz.
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