Yahoo Answers will be shut down forever, according to an announcement on its website, as reported by Verge for the first time. Final questions can be sent until April 20, and the entire site will be erased from the Internet by May 4, 2021, thus ending the 16-year reign of one of the most idiotic places on the Internet.
What Yahoo Answers lacked in contributions to the pantheon of world knowledge that it made up for in its heroic advances in memorably ridiculous content. BuzzFeed has run lists over the years of stupid and silly questions on the site, and the most famous, the question “how is babby formed”, a jewel discovered by Jon Hendren for a post on Something Awful’s blog.
Like anything really stupid, Yahoo Answers, which has been owned by Verizon since 2017, was made up of many things in one. It was the Library of Alexandria for serious knowledge seekers, like those looking to learn how the girl gets stuck. It was an extremely astute ploy for SEO traffic, but it was also an incomplete social platform, where users could spend time answering social etiquette questions and advice.
Considering that Section 230, legislation that protects platforms like Yahoo or Facebook from being legally responsible for content posted by users, is currently under debate, Verizon may have looked into the swamp of Yahoo Answers and chosen to avoid the headache. .
Yahoo has a long and glorious history of shutting down large chunks of itself, a wild fox gnawing several members of a trap in its efforts to maintain relevance and cut costs. In 2009, Yahoo closed Geocities, one of the largest repositories of Internet culture in the Y2K era. Del.ic.ious was sold in 2011, Flickr in 2018. Yahoo Messenger was closed in 2018. In late 2019, Yahoo Groups was uploaded to digital Valhalla.
Verizon bought AOL in 2015 and Yahoo in 2017, merging them into a new content company called Oath (no, really), 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 the calendar* about 2 months ago.
“It is clear that Verizon bought Yahoo and never wanted to be in the user content business. And every move they have made has been the most cowardly corporate move, reduced liability and reduced exposure they can make, ”said Jason Scott of the Archive Team, a group that works to preserve old sites, to BuzzFeed News.
The Archives Team struggled to make copies of Geocities when it closed in the short term in 2009 (a collection curated by artist Olia Lialina called One Terabytes of Kilobyte Age examines old Geocities websites).
“We took Yahoo Answers in the past, we did it 4 years ago. We knew what was going to happen, ”said Scott. “We don’t trust anything Yahoo has, period.”
Despite the stupidity, there is certainly valuable information there that can only be found in answers that will be lost forever (or existing only in a file, which is more difficult to access than a mere Google result).
The fact that a large chunk of Internet history is being deleted is nothing new at this point, and the feeling is so familiar that it doesn’t seem to hurt that much. “We don’t know how much of the Internet depends on links to it, or treating it as firsthand knowledge,” said Scott. “What we lose is that we lose part of our oral history, whether we like it or not.”