Yahoo! Answers Is Going Offline For Good

April 6, 2021 / Posted by:

Mark your calendars — An ominous date is nigh. On May 4th, Yahoo! Answers, that lawless digital milieu will go dark. According to The Verge, after 16 years of hosting one of the internet’s most egalitarian sources of hilarity and confusion, Verizon Media Group, which now owns Yahoo!, has decided to pull the plug, thus extinguishing the light of knowledge before we ever get a coherent answer to the question “how is babby formed?” Sorry, kavya. You’re on your own, kiddo.

The Verge reports that starting on April 20th, Yahoo! Answers will stop taking questions.

Yahoo Answers, one of the longest-running and most storied web Q&A platforms in the history of the internet, is shutting down on May 4th. That’s the day the Yahoo Answers website will start redirecting to the Yahoo homepage, and all of the platform’s archives will apparently cease to exist. The platform has been operating since 2005, and in the years since its relevance as a meme haven has remained intact while its practicality as a forum has waned during the rise of Reddit, Quora, and other competing internet hangouts.

Users will also have until June 30th to request their data or it’ll be inaccessible after that. That includes “all user-generated content including your Questions list, Questions, Answers list, Answers, and any images,” Yahoo says, but “you won’t be able to download other users’ content, questions, or answers.”

Apparently, in recent years, the forum became a hub for far-right conspiracy theories and misinformation, which might be the unstated reason for the shutdown. CNN reports:

Like many corners of the internet, Yahoo Answers has become a cesspool of conspiracy theories and outlandish questions that dragged down Yahoo’s brand as it tries to move upscale. For example, one of the top questions on the website Tuesday morning asks “Is Yahoo Answers being shut down because conservatives have exposed the Socialist takeover of America?”

Yahoo! Answers might have been the world’s least helpful Q&A forum, but it was ours and it will be missed. Many a day I’ve had a gentle smile creep onto my face when a Yahoo! Answer appears on page 3 of a Google search assuring me that yes, I probably do have cancer of the pusspuss and also a spider living in there?

So here’s to the good old times when the difference between the troll and the trollee was an unanswerable riddle posed by very apparatus built to answer it.

Pic: YouTube

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