by surround on 4/6/21, 12:14 AM
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
by maininformer on 4/6/21, 3:49 AM
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.
by GormanFletcher on 4/5/21, 10:11 PM
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.
by endisneigh on 4/5/21, 8:35 PM
by aerosmile on 4/5/21, 11:44 PM
by marcodiego on 4/5/21, 8:21 PM
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.
by aerovistae on 4/5/21, 11:19 PM
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.
by Animats on 4/5/21, 8:14 PM
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...
by didip on 4/5/21, 10:06 PM
Random trivia: Larry Page's brother Carl Page sold eGroups to Yahoo for $432 million which then turned into Yahoo Answers.
by jdlyga on 4/5/21, 8:50 PM
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.
by amyjess on 4/5/21, 8:05 PM
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.
by ravenstine on 4/5/21, 9:11 PM
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.
by terse_malvolio on 4/5/21, 9:15 PM
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
by mitjak on 4/5/21, 8:25 PM
how is babby formed
by justplay on 4/5/21, 9:30 PM
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.
by WarOnPrivacy on 4/5/21, 4:47 PM
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.
by GolDDranks on 4/6/21, 11:29 AM
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.
by aerosmile on 4/5/21, 11:32 PM
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/
by softwaredoug on 4/5/21, 8:57 PM
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.)
by teekert on 4/6/21, 9:19 AM
by cung on 4/6/21, 4:44 AM
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.
by keeganjw on 4/5/21, 8:27 PM
What does this mean for My Brother, My Brother, and Me... Griffin's gonna be bummed.
by itsbits on 4/6/21, 5:10 AM
by mkr-hn on 4/5/21, 9:13 PM
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.
by com2kid on 4/5/21, 8:53 PM
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!
by tomaszs on 4/5/21, 10:38 PM
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.
by thirtyseven on 4/5/21, 8:26 PM
Rough year for the McElroys, huh?
by anonytrary on 4/6/21, 2:13 AM
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.
by alex_g on 4/5/21, 8:29 PM
by SteveGerencser on 4/5/21, 8:54 PM
Just think of all those low quality links placed there for SEO reasons that are about to vanish.
by llacb47 on 4/5/21, 10:17 PM
Sad. Yahoo no longer wants to be responsible for hosting any UGC, they would rather sell ads.
by aviraldg on 4/5/21, 9:16 PM
Does this include Yahoo Answers Japan (which I believe is still quite active)?
by iJohnDoe on 4/5/21, 8:11 PM
by bobbydreamer on 4/6/21, 6:37 PM
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.
by thinkafterbef on 4/5/21, 8:37 PM
by sub7 on 4/6/21, 5:03 AM
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
by ataylor32 on 4/6/21, 2:10 AM
by userbinator on 4/6/21, 12:32 AM
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.
by betwixthewires on 4/7/21, 3:33 AM
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.
by OakNinja on 4/5/21, 8:59 PM
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.
by brutal_chaos_ on 4/6/21, 12:13 AM
by themadprogramer on 4/5/21, 9:37 PM
by Taylor_OD on 4/6/21, 2:29 PM
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.
by twobitshifter on 4/5/21, 8:26 PM
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).
by whenlambo on 4/6/21, 7:56 AM
Being always inspired by online communication, I’ve recently launched casual Q&A website
https://ffun.ioby tyingq on 4/5/21, 8:54 PM
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.
by imvetri on 4/6/21, 6:15 AM
Train AI on its data. There wont be a need for archiving.
by joshspankit on 4/5/21, 11:42 PM
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.
by racl101 on 4/6/21, 2:31 PM
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.
by gpvos on 4/7/21, 2:54 PM
>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.
by unixhero on 4/5/21, 9:37 PM
They don't list the reason for *why*
by astockwell on 4/5/21, 10:23 PM
"...and thousands of physics/chemistry students all cried out at once, and then were silenced."
by tijuco2 on 4/6/21, 6:28 AM
That is so sad. Long time ago I was addicted to answer I.T stuff there. This website was a great idea!
by pdimitar on 4/5/21, 9:11 PM
Will there be an archive somewhere?
by bliteben on 4/5/21, 10:52 PM
Looking back Yahoo is going to seem like an elaborate scam to extract money from stockholders.
by js4ever on 4/5/21, 8:16 PM
May the 4th be with them forever
by hota_mazi on 4/5/21, 10:27 PM
Oh no! How are new generations going to learn how babbies are formed?
by pknerd on 4/7/21, 7:19 AM
I wonder whether robots.txt of Yahoo answers have links available?
by sadfev on 4/6/21, 5:49 AM
No! They were such a cesspool and also internet history!
by wyxuan on 4/5/21, 8:31 PM
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
by languagehacker on 4/6/21, 1:29 PM
Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021?
by particulars02 on 4/5/21, 9:57 PM
but....HOW IS BABBY FORMED?
by vforvendettador on 4/5/21, 10:03 PM
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.
by 13daug on 4/7/21, 12:37 PM
Really
by roguson on 4/7/21, 2:49 PM
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.
by DC1350 on 4/5/21, 8:22 PM
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.
