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.<p><a href="https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior</a>
This reminds me of a couple of cute Yahoo! answers story.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
My favorite question on YA<p><a href="https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090226170437AAajg6n" rel="nofollow">https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090226170437A...</a>
AuntKatie will be disappointed - she wrote 143k answers.<p><a href="https://answers.yahoo.com/activity/questions?show=sjRwIxRCaa" rel="nofollow">https://answers.yahoo.com/activity/questions?show=sjRwIxRCaa</a>
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.
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.
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?<p>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...
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.<p>I sure hope they don't shut down Yahoo Finance. It's the best thing that Yahoo currently has.
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.<p>Nevertheless, I'm going to miss it. The trolling was fun to read, at least.
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.
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?<p>Curious what answers HN found interesting?
Algolia Search:
<a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fanswers.yahoo.com%2F" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fanswers.yahoo.com%2F</a>
Dang. I learned better posting skills at YA. Specifically, I learned to create more concise answers, quickly.<p>My proving ground was the religious answers group, where I went head to head with the dominant anti-faith trolls.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>[0] <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2006/11/30/yahoos-big-win/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2006/11/30/yahoos-big-win/</a>
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.<p>(Not that I am complaining about it, I just think we should disabuse ourselves of this notion.)
Oh no! We may loose this gem [0], thankfully we have the internet archive.<p>[0] <a href="https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20121030224201AAnKzZZ" rel="nofollow">https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201210302242...</a>
Why is person-to-person knowledge being replaced with company-to-person?<p>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.
One of top contributers I see is . (dot)<p>Yes. Just dot in symbol.<p><a href="https://answers.yahoo.com/activity/questions?show=AA11447210" rel="nofollow">https://answers.yahoo.com/activity/questions?show=AA11447210</a>
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.<p>Yahoo Answers matters more to culture than any New York Times trend piece.
Completely off topic: That is the longest list of "framework partners" that I have ever denied access to.<p>There are 400 (!!!) "partners" listed just for personalized ads!
It is sad to hear Yahoo didn't take responsible steps to preserve the content of the service for future generations.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>> 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.<p>I guess not. Shame.
Gonna have to archive this one for Franc R's gem of a contribution <a href="https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080603191133AAUUGxn" rel="nofollow">https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080603191133A...</a>
Quick, we need to get Archive.org on the case. /sarcasm<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26703203" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26703203</a>
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....<p>Y!A was precise in lots of things. They should have just reinvented, u mean just change the webdesign and restarted it.<p>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.
4.1M clicks about to go down.
<a href="https://i.imgur.com/0pxHInh.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/0pxHInh.png</a>
Quora will be them as well, nobody has figured out how to maintain question/answer quality at scale<p>Simple up/down voting systems are too easily gamed
There have been multiple links to the "how is prangent formed" video, but let's not forget about the "Curse of The Weggy Board" video:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15nNY7uofNw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15nNY7uofNw</a>
<i>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.</i><p>This sadly reminds me of what happened with the Yahoo Groups shutdown.
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).<p>Ive got to say though, good riddance.
Yahoo’s problem is mainly that they don’t seem to know how to get paid and what to get paid for.<p>They run a popular service for free for years and then shut it down because they don’t make any money.
Maybe this will be helpful: <a href="https://github.com/buren/wayback_archiver" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/buren/wayback_archiver</a>
Am I pregant? That will be all: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgckQGnFEAI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgckQGnFEAI</a>
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.
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).
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.
<i>>Yahoo has made the decision to shut down Yahoo Answers. To better assist you with this transition we've compiled a list of questions.</i><p>Love it.
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<p>Source:<p>Dude just trust me
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.
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.
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.