Death of Yahoo! Answers

Having begun in 2005, the service closed on 4th May, and the content was completely deleted on 30th June.[2]

It is testament to how infrequently I now use my Yahoo! email accounts that I did not learn about this until 1st July.

Does anyone have any thoughts or feelings about this? I know that for a great many years it has been a running joke among the online community that Yahoo! ought to have closed down completely. I'm actually kind of surprised that Answers lasted as long as it did. Certainly I hadn't used it for quite some time.

and nothing of value was lost!

And this needed a thread because...?

hey,informing us Yahoo answers is no more,and the aim to reminisce about Yahoo's answers

The vast majority of Yahoo Answers may have been meh, but its deletion speaks to a concerning trend of how fast Internet history and information is disappearing. Entire archives can vanish in instants, and the web is becoming smaller and more homogenized. Remember how happy people were to find the old Space Jam website still existed after all these years? That's becoming rarer and rarer.

Four replies in four hours? Wow, this is already going better than my Round the Twist thread!

Given the notoriety of the content on Yahoo! Answers I am, on some level, rather glad for it to disappear down the memory hole. I agree that the lack of permanence for so much of the web could be a problem over all.

Never cared for Yahoo Answers because most of the "answers" came from clueless chuckleheads, but I guess I see where the concerns and lamentation of those who worry for internet archives come from.

On the other hand, we wouldn't have these gems:

While we're here, does anyone remember using (or even seeing) Virtual Teen Forums. I never posted there but I read a lot of their threads in the previous decade, and last month I went back a few times out of nostalgia, but now I find that it too disappeared on 1st July.[1]

The same company also did Gov Teen which disappeared many years back, and which I remember being practically indistinguishable.

Internet Etiquettes did mourn the passing of Yahoo Answers.

Edited by Ghilz on Jul 21st 2021 at 7:39:02 AM

I feel like my usage for my Yahoo Mail is getting rarer and rarer now that Yahoo Answers is gone...

I feel like the people asking stupid questions will now move to Reddit or Quora. Or Google, but that wouldn't feel the same.

I originally only had a Yahoo! Mail account to use Yahoo answers, but I then ended up using it for membership of various online fora. Over the years the service became less and less functional while the requirements for logging in became more and more onerous so I transferred to a different provider and set up auto-forwarding so I wouldn't actually have to use my Yahoo! account any more. A few months ago auto-forwarding was disabled^note Hence I didn't get the memo about Answers closing until too late, though if I actually cared about it by that point I might have known from other sources., so it would have been hard to get by, but with all the services for which I used it being ended I guess it's essentially vestigial now.

Yeah I just use my oooooooold yahoo mail as a throwaway. Occasionally check in case some clothing store is having a sale and that’s it.