Yahoo Answers, one of the internet's most storied Q&A sites, will be shut down on May 4 and the company says a comprehensive archive will not be provided
The end of a long and storied internet era (of bad questions and even worse answers) — Yahoo Answers, one of the longest-running …
The VergeNick Statt
Context & Ripple Effects
Yahoo Answers joins a sequence of Yahoo product retirements that includes the planned deletion of Yahoo Groups posts and the shutdown of Yahoo Messenger. The distinguishing consequence here is that Yahoo says it will not offer a comprehensive archive, making the closure a loss of access to the site’s accumulated material rather than only the end of a service.
Earlier coverage also records Yahoo ending regional news, games, alerts, profile sites, and its directory, placing Answers within a longer contraction of legacy Yahoo properties.
First-order effects
Yahoo Answers users lose the ability to use the Q&A service after May 4, while Yahoo will not provide a comprehensive official archive of its content.
People seeking old Yahoo Answers posts will no longer have a complete Yahoo-provided source once the service closes.
Second-order effects
Any preservation of Yahoo Answers material shifts from Yahoo to users and third parties, with no comprehensive company archive to serve as a common reference point.
The closure further narrows Yahoo’s remaining collection of long-running community and information products after Groups and Messenger.
Third-order effects
If Yahoo continues retiring legacy properties without comprehensive archives, its historical user-generated corpus will become increasingly fragmented or unavailable.
The pattern favors active services over maintaining older community archives, a structural trade-off that also shapes the material available to answer-oriented information products.
The trend: Yahoo’s retreat from legacy internet services is pairing product shutdowns with the erosion of access to the user-generated archives those services accumulated.
Verizon probably could have turned some of the classic Yahoo Answers posts into NFTs and maybe made some money back on that Yahoo deal. https://twitter.com/...
Not that I wondered why, but I checked Ask: Five actual question mark items on its front page out of 26 slots. Topics cover entertainment, sports, culture. Now, check out Yahoo Answers — which seems algo-generated popular posts, almost all political and... https://twitter.com/...…
I'm here for Yahoo Answers jokes, but I'm mostly really bummed that Verizon is being a terrible steward of internet history. This site should be archived for the future. https://www.theverge.com/...
First, we will delete the human-made history of the Internet (almost done) Then replace everything with fake AI content (in progress) https://twitter.com/...
Kinda wild how Quora came along and made Yahoo answers essentially obsolete. Same with any modern video-chatting service and Skype. The giants can wither away more easily than we think. https://twitter.com/...