After 16 years of asinine questions and dubious answers, Yahoo Answers is shutting down next month. The company announced that starting April 20, users won't be able to post new questions or answer other people's questions; on May 4, the site will become inaccessible, and will redirect to the Yahoo homepage.
Users who've posted questions and answers in the past can download their data via request before June 30, , here. A late Web 1. Yahoo Answers could not outpace the social networking tools of sites like Facebook, nor the colloquial-community questions that grow on sites like Reddit.
We knew what was going to happen. As well as Archive Team, the Internet Archive will also be backing-up Yahoo answers - although such a short time period between announcement and closure means it will be hard to track such a huge number of web addresses.
This is our collective history we are talking about, not just some corporations property. In , it purchased Tumblr, gutted it of its pornographic content and, as a result, its communities, before selling the entire thing to Wordpress at a significant loss. Opinions may vary on whether that means Yahoo owes it to those people—or to posterity—to maintain those posts forever.
It could also try to stop the volunteers from getting automatically blocked. In practice, the archivists often find themselves locked out for big chunks of time as they rush to do their work.
This was a particularly bad problem with the Yahoo Groups rescue project, because Yahoo Groups was made up of millions of different sites, Scott said. Scrolling through the percolating conversations on Yahoo Answers confirms that much of this material is less than premium, at best. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic.
Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. At a time when users online were moving away from traditional message board systems and chat rooms, Yahoo Answers was there -- serving as a half-step between the internet communities of the late s and the social media empires that were about to take over the web. It's one aspect of the service that survived to the end.
Browsing Yahoo Answers' categories in its final days still surfaced plenty of standard questions seeking answers "Can u write on money," or "How do I get a grease stain out of concrete" , but you could also find the same discussions you'd expect on Reddit. These range from new parents asking in the parenting forum what people thought of the name of their child, or political partisans debating the latest headlines in the politics and news sections. After May 4, the Yahoo question-and-answer service will go the way of GeoCities.
There'll be no official attempts to preserve or archive the service. Unless an outside group takes action, Yahoo Answers' millions of questions -- chaotic, hilarious and sublime -- will be lost to time. Fortunately, this is the internet, where there's always someone happy to preserve a bizarre database of terrible spelling and weird questions -- even if it might not be worth saving.
When Yahoo announced it was shutting the service down, Gizmodo wrote that it created a script that would archive 84 million Yahoo Answers questions to the Internet Archive, but admitted that it would take two years to complete the process. Fortunately, a group called Archive Team started a similar project back in A large portion of Yahoo Answers' publicly available questions are already backed up, and the team has made archiving the rest their "warrior project" focus for spring For better or worse, Yahoo Answers' weird legacy will be preserved on the Internet Archive.
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