Yahoo answers would be shutting down on May 4,2021 as it is announced
by Yahoo on April 5,2021. Yahoo answers is a community driven platform under
Yahoo which allows people to submit their questions and also allows them to
answer the questions submitted. Moreover, the questions and answers are up
voted to increase their visibility.
There are several categories and sub-categories in which questions are
organized so that people can ask and answer questions related to every topic
such as beauty, business, finance, cars, entertainment, games, parenting,
pregnancy, science, news, travel, electronics etc.
It has been announced by the website that it will switch to read-only
mode from April 20. After April 20, no users will be able to answer or ask any
questions on the site.
Yahoo Answers arrived in 2005 and since then it is contributing to
human knowledge. A corner of the internet will be erased where people used to
confine their weirdest feelings and views about the things happening around
them.
Answering and asking questions on Yahoo Answers was never a task which
required expertise or experience. There are known numbers of questions which
people simply asked out of curiosity and in earnest ignorance.
Children used to ask questions over the site which they would never
dare to ask families, friends and teachers. So, the site was seen as a comfortable
space for people and children.
A comedy podcast named as “My Brother, My Brother and Me" has
featured questions from the service since 2010. According to co-host of this
comedy podcast, Justin Mc Clory, “Yahoo Answers was a place for people to put
questions they were too embarrassed to ask the people they knew in real
life".
People genuinely used the site to cope up with the struggles they were
facing in the real life such as schools and offices and also sometimes they
used the service to receive sexual education which they were not getting
elsewhere.
Sex education is a rare sight in Indian schools. Questions and
curiosities related to sex are commonly answered with “Who is teaching you this
nonsense? This is not a part of our culture.”
Yahoo Answers is known for being a platform where people ask weird and
dumbest but sensible questions such as “How a babby is formed?”. This question
which must have been asked by a perplexed soul who has a very little knowledge
of reproductive science, launched a meme.
In such environment, children found answers to their teenage sex
questions, out here. Of course, the questions were packed with jokes, stupid
replies, and conspiracy theories, and led to even more questions, but at least
it gave a safe space to ask those questions.
It is a platform where people received the real human reactions
without any filters, for better or for worse.
Yahoo Answers supported people to realize their sense to self. It can
be well understood by some questions which are asked on the site such as ‘Is
being popular in high school a good skill I can use in a job interview' and
‘Why do people with baguettes think they are better than me?’
Some unexplainable questions also had space to get asked there such as
‘Why everything at my grandma's house moist?’ and ‘Smoke coming from my belly
button?’
Desperate feelings also found their corner over the site such as ‘What
does a hug feel like?’
The wide popularity of the service declined over the years as there
are more competitors now than there were when it was created. Quora has become
a platform which is more likely to attract an expert response. For people’s
idle curiosity to roam free, Reddit features a forum.
In a letter to it’s users, Yahoo said it had “decided to shift our
resources away from Yahoo Answers to focus on products that better serve our
members and deliver on Yahoo's promise of providing premium trusted content.”
Until June 30,2021, people can request their data which includes “all
user-generated content including your Questions list, Questions Answers list,
Answers and any images,” Yahoo said, but “you won’t be able to download other
users' content, questions, or answers.”
Written By – Sanjana Yadav
Edited by – Adrija Saha
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