Yahoo’s answers will be turned off forever, according to an announcement on the website, as first reported by the Verge. Final questions can be submitted until April 20, and the entire website will be scorched from the internet by May 4, 2021, ending the 16-year-old government of one of the dumbest places on the internet.
What Yahoo Answers is Missing in Contributions to the Pantheon of World Knowledge That Made It Up in Its Heroic Advancement in Ridiculous Content. Over the years, BuzzFeed has presented lists of stupid and silly questions from the site, and the best known is the question ‘how is babby formed’, a gem unveiled by Jon Hendren for a blog post for Something Awful.
Like any stupid thing, Yahoo Answers, which has been owned by Verizon since 2017, had many things rolled into one. It was the Library of Alexandria for serious seekers of knowledge, such as those who wanted to learn how girl gets pregnant. It was an extremely cunning ploy for SEO traffic, but also a half-baked social platform, where users could answer the hours to answer social etiquette and advice questions.
Since Article 230, legislation that protects platforms such as Yahoo or Facebook from being held legally liable for user-posted content, is currently in question, Verizon may have looked into the swamp of Yahoo Answers and opted to avoid the headache.
Yahoo has a long and glorious history of shutting down large chunks of itself, a wild fox that stalks various limbs of a trap in its efforts to maintain relevance and save costs. In 2009, Yahoo Geocities, one of the largest repositories of Internet culture from the Y2K era, closes. Del.ic.ious was sold in 2011, Flickr in 2018. Yahoo Messenger was shut down in 2018. At the end of 2019, Yahoo Groups was sent to digital Valhalla.
Verizon bought AOL in 2015 and Yahoo in 2017, and merged with a new content company called Oath (no, seriously), along with Tumblr and the Huffington Post. Tumblr was sold to Automattic, the company that owns WordPress in 2019, and HuffPost was sold to BuzzFeed *check calendar* about 2 months ago.
“It’s clear that Verizon bought Yahoo and never wanted to be in users’ content. And every move they made was the worst corporate, diminished liability and exposure they could do, ”Jason Scott of Archive Team, a group working to preserve old sites, told BuzzFeed News.
Archive Team struggled to make copies of Geocities when it was shut down at short notice in 2009 (a collection compiled by artist Olia Lialina called One Terabytes of Kilobyte Age explores old Geocities sites).
‘We’ve grabbed Yahoo Answers in the past, we did it 4 years ago. “We knew what was going to happen,” Scott said. “We do not trust anything that Yahoo owns.”
Despite the stupidity, there is certainly valuable information out there that can only be found in the answers that will be lost forever (or exist only in an archive, which is harder to obtain than a mere Google result).
That much of the Internet’s history is being removed is not new at this point, and the feeling is so well known that it does not seem to sting as much. “We do not know how much of the internet depends on the linking of this or treating it as first-hand knowledge,” Scott said. “What we have lost is that we are losing a part of our oral history, whether we like it or not.”