Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021
uk.help.yahoo.com
uk.help.yahoo.com
Folks, careful what extensions you add.
Check http://chat.efnet.org:9090/?channels=%23noanswers for updates.
Sometimes there's some good content, but you gotta wade through the 99% sewage to see any of it.
But there's less of that than one might think. It rapidly reaches the state where the questions become highly specific (e.g. diagnose a medical condition, fix a bug, solve a personal problem, homework questions), repetitive, or argumentative. The Q&A format just isn't very good for long-term growth.
So there probably is good content on Y!A. (I like to think I contributed some myself.) But that quickly becomes swamped under a vast morass of unanswerable questions and poor-quality answers.
Nobody seems to have found a good solution to that. StackOverflow seems to be doing best, but at a cost of keeping its community small (small enough to fit in a single rack) and highly focused. Having a continuously changing technology helps -- but on a more general Q&A site that rapidly degrades into arguing about politics.
The projection given on IRC was "There's no way we'll get them all" and "assuming 150 million items, we need to go ~5 times what we are now" so help is appreciated!
Aren't you also providing 100% of the resources if they are using your IP, or is there a way for them to do most of the work "behind" your IP?
100% of what resources? Bandwidth, yes - you need to download the answers and then upload them to the archive. Fortunately it compresses fantastically so the uploads are fairly inconsequential. Even more fortunately, Yahoo! Answers is text-based, making the bandwidth usage pretty minor compared to almost any other past Archive Team project. It's really the overhead of each individual network request that they're trying to outsource here.
But for storage? You're providing approximately 0% of that. Files are only stored on your device for long enough for your computer to hand them off to a more permanent home at archive.org. CPU usage is also very minimal - again, thanks to text compressing super easily, the compression settings don't need to be particularly aggressive.
Does anyone happen to know what safeguards exist to protect against random child porn or other illegal content from flowing through my connection?
I checked the site but didn’t see anything address this concern.
My fear is the archive grabs a page that happens to have nefarious content which I’d be legally on the hook for.
Am I being overly cautious or is there a genuine risk?
You're being overly cautious. There is no legal risk in viewing a Yahoo! Answers page (or any other ArchiveTeam Warrior recommended project for that matter).
Alternatively, the collection code could do something weird or suspicious, but it's open source and the team has a good reputation/enough social proof leading me to consider that unlikely
In a past life I was misplaced by the high schools sorting-hat counselor into the house of civil engineering. I was motivated and so our Hydrology professor made me the TA for his Hydraulics class.
He would give me questions with no answers to go through in my sections. The questions were damn hard and I would sometimes ask them on Yahoo! answers and this particular guy from India would always come and answer them meticulously and write integrals using unholy script like: int(a,b)Sin x dx and such and I would happily decode them for half an hour before trying to understand the solution. Fun times.
A similar guy helped me a lot when I was learning C. Hey Manjunath! if you're reading this thanks I'm a software engineer now.
Sure, it's probably millions of dollars per year that they're throwing out by not keeping it passively online, so it'd be in the company's interest, but with apologies to Mitt Romney, corporations aren't people. If something isn't advantageous to at least one individual decision maker, it won't happen.
Edit: my bootstrapped company was acquired by a much larger corporation and produced material EBITDA for 10 years, even in the year when it was shut down. Why was it shut down? Because it was written in PHP and the corporation was not going to support that tech stack anymore.
**
Analogy from the automotive world [0]:
> the $10m McLaren F1’s software can only run on a Compaq LTE 5280. The reason being that they run on an installed, bespoke CA card. This CA card is the interface that communicates between the laptop and the car. Of course, since the software was developed in 1992, it should be no surprise that it’s DOS based.
The reality of it is probably not, actually. Not when you consider the full cost of running it -- not just the engineers maintaining it, but the extra complexity of perhaps outdated technology (can make it harder for other teams to move forward, to migrate servers, etc.), and especially important the time spent by management in managing its continued existence.
And the management aspect is less about their salaries and more about what more profitable things they're not focusing on instead. You might say "well just hire another manager" but that manager has to be managed. Ultimately the CEO and board only have a finite amount of time to review projects and monitor performance, and otherwise even mildly profitable projects no longer become worth it when the cost of them being a distraction to management is taken into account.
I agree corporations are not people but then why are they taxed instead of just the people? This whole country was founded on the principle of "no taxation without representation". Any people or organization being taxed will try to influence politics to improve their tax bill. There is no way around that.
You can have corporate taxes or you can have politics with no corporation meddling but you cannot and will never get both as people who own these corporations will always try to lobby politics one way or another in favor of the corporations.
Eliminating corporate taxes would not change the fact that corporations want to tilt politics in their direction. There are other suggestions for ways to compensate for the differences between personal income and income to a corporation you own, but they always have to be designed to be cognizant of the way people will game the system.
I assume they sold Delicious and Tumblr because of outcries. I can’t recall if I am misremembering, but I believe Delicious was going to be shut down according to an early leaked slide show before being sold to the YouTube founders.
It’s probably not worth selling something for 7 figures. when your parent company is the hugely profitable Verizon, no less, if Yahoo was still an independent $2B company.
I assume the web app can’t be sold for too much when it has to get a new domain name and name.
Then either Yahoo has to untangle the code or only sell the database. The latter could easily become negative PR depending on what the new owner’s site is like. The former doesn’t seem worth it.
By this logic, no collection of people can be considered "people". Indians aren't people, men aren't people, etc etc. As an Indian man, I find that idea absurd.
Unanimity isn't a prerequisite for personhood in the context of whether or not the rights extended to individuals disappear the moment those individuals act as an association/group. Corporations are people because they are groups of people.
Your argument is logically false.
A group of people is not a person. A group of Indians is not a person. Each of them individually has personhood - the group does not.
Corporations are people whenever it's advantageous to those corporations. In all other situations, corporations are not people.
But for years now, I've never seen a Yahoo Answers link in my search results. You have things like Reddit now highly indexed which has far less silly answers and questions through actually having moderation.
I doubt its getting much traffic, and if it is, it's probably providing a bad look to the brand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...!
https://digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index.html
It's got 20 years of content. No Javascript, just plain html.
It came in really handy when I wrote the history of the D programming language paper.
I agree: Strange choice. But as is the world of large corporations and decision-making.
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090226170437A...
I have friends from other countries who have told me that libraries in their home countries are indeed commercial, you pay a small fee to rent a book for a fixed period of time. Stories from childhood, so I am not sure if such libraries are still common place in those countries, but the question is most certainly not stupid.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_libraries_in_North_Amer...
That's $44 a year to checkout up to 50 items (only 6 ebooks) and $1 for every reservation you want to make. For $56 bucks you get unlimited checkout. Its not exactly a huge cost, but still not what I expected based on my experience in the US and my perception of Europe
I'm always fascinated to see comparisons between the US and Europe (as a European myself), as if the comparison were between two countries, rather than a country and a continent consisting of many, very different countries. You'll find some commonality between neighbouring European countries, but not in the same way you would between US states.
Speaking from experience, the UK & Ireland have an extensive system of public libraries, usually each local area will have one, where books and materials can be checked out for free.
Similarly my experience in France was the same, materials can be checked out for free.
Can't speak for any other European countries.
The role for subscription based libraries in the UK is usually for specialist nonacademic research, or perhaps just an old community of readers who like things just-so.
Back in the 19th century one of the things mutuals and co-ops used to do in the UK was provide reading rooms, circulating libraries, lectures and such, much like Carnegie's libraries. It was often working class self help rather than liberal philanthropy, too. There's a great history of this (and lots more) in Jonathan Rose's Intellectual History of the British Working Class.
It _completely_ changes the meaning, if someone asked a question about airplanes on September 10th, 2001 or one day later. Just saying "two decades ago" with no way to reveal the original timestamp removes that context.
It's just one of a whole lot of ways the modern web goes out of its way to get in my way.
<meta property="og:question:published_time" content="2009-02-26T17:04:37Z">
However, you're completely right when it comes to timestamps exceeding a certain age. That's why in my own projects I use a mixed approach: display recently changed things in relative time and all others in absolute terms.
I also advocate to display more detailed information when the user mouses over a timestamp, just so the data is there if needed - as it is in this case.
"It's about half past two."
"It's a little before quarter to three."
It would even take less space:
4 hours ago
04:12AM
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/how-i...
https://answers.yahoo.com/activity/questions?show=sjRwIxRCaa
Way to hit the feelers.
All of it about to be annihilated...
We're so transient, all that we love, experience, and care about. It hurts.
https://redditblog.com/2015/10/03/ken-m-interview-internet-t...
https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/yahoo-groups-is-ending-...
But your point stands, looked at as a whole, and with data mining, I guess they could gather something about common words uses, time spent on the internet etc...
But I wonder who would really care about the flame wars, and chit chat 200 years from now.
Verizon may be getting out of content. With antitrust regulation picking up, it's quite likely that telcos will be required to get out of the content business. Historically, the US made movie companies stop owning movie theaters, and car companies stop owning dealers. Although Yahoo is now such a loser that it's hard to make an antitrust case against Verizon owning them. AT&T and DirectTV, though...
Baffling to some HN readers perhaps, but Yahoo is still one of the biggest online destinations. It has a DAU count an order of magnitude larger than say Reddit, and it monetizes those users far more effectively.
Citation needed.
Yahoo.com, rank 12, Reddit.com, rank 19.
I would say that Reddit, despite its popularity, is notoriously mismanaged, so it's actually quite an appropriate comparison. Reddit is just culturally more relevant :-)
Incidentally, they've also lost all my mail from before year 2001, when I actually use them for personal communications, meaning all those emails are now lost (well maybe I have a backup somewhere...). What a fucking useless company.
It seems like if you haven't used it in 12 months they just delete all your old emails. No warning whatsoever.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com
(Again, whatever that means.)
But I think they have a few valuable properties. Sports. Finance. And for whatever reason, the old folks in my family love their Yahoo Weather app.
The only reason I get yahoo email is because there was a vulnerability a few years ago and everyone's account got broken into.
I think my friend uses it for news.
I sure hope they don't shut down Yahoo Finance. It's the best thing that Yahoo currently has.
Remember when Yahoo hired a CEO who lied about having a CS degree?
https://money.cnn.com/2012/05/13/technology/yahoo-ceo-out/in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Thompson_(businessman)
His Yahoo departure is attributed to thyroid cancer: "In 2012, Thompson was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, which was said to be a reason for leaving Yahoo!."
And Marissa Mayer became extremely wealthy for her mishandling of Yahoo.
The corporate equivalent of a terminal cancer patient.
What it was, is aptly described here: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2848
Where is that today? Gone, I guess. But it could have been an Amazon or Shopify.
They also had a lucrative ad business. Gone now, I think.
At some point they tried to become a media company or something and did hire a lot of journalists, but they kept making the wrong moves and trying to acquire users by buying unprofitable websites like Tumblr and eventually ran out of money.
They have the name recognition to pull off something like this.
Seems like Answers, as cool and interesting and funny as it was, was probably not a major revenue driver or even loss leader anymore for Yahoo. Seems like it'd be an obvious candidate for being cut, as a deadweight project that siphons engineering time from initiatives that actually make money.
Sure, it's sad that it's going away. But Yahoo isn't a charity, it's a corporation, and "jettison projects that cost money and focus instead on projects that make money" seems like one of the most basic tenets of managing a business.
Like, I totally get the argument that when Yahoo or Google or whoever shuts down one of their services it's an annoyance for users. No doubt. But I don't understand how it's a sign of "mismanagement".
Considering that oath is an ad company and Answers is among the top results for many Google searches and most of the Answer traffic probably is read only this is weird.
Answers users give an intent what they are up to, which allows targeting ads based on that topic. Having mostly readily traffic means that infrastructure can be efficient ...
So yeah, manageqment didn't handle the position well.
My post was a general statement and not directed at any singular Yahoo product.
A few years later they acquired LinkedIn for around that much, and that's definitely been more successful than most of what Yahoo offers now.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-idUSWNAS8942200...
This was not one of them.
It never attracted high quality Q&A, and was a joke from day one.
Still makes me laugh
Nevertheless, I'm going to miss it. The trolling was fun to read, at least.
Best question I'm aware of on Yahoo Answers. And the infinite loop response is the best answer.
Do you have any recommendations on how to find more content in this genre (dysfunctional humor / best of dumbest internet content)? It's hard to come up with search terms that would lead me to find this kind of video.
Like the hunter2 one: http://bash.org/?244321
And then people also post stuff in the same vein: https://www.reddit.com/r/NotKenM/
YA has little value in providing actual answers, but it's a great source of entertainment and possibly even illumination into how a certain subset of the population think.
Reminds me of the famous(ish) meme that came from Yahoo Answers: https://youtu.be/Ll-lia-FEIY
for example: https://www.theonion.com/ask-a-navy-seal-1819583375
or a more pertinent one:
https://www.theonion.com/ask-a-high-school-student-who-didnt...
Have you looked recently? Quora is mostly online marketers. Only marginally better than 12yr olds.
Curious what answers HN found interesting? Algolia Search: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fanswers.yahoo.com%2F
My proving ground was the religious answers group, where I went head to head with the dominant anti-faith trolls.
Yahoo Chiebukuro is an indispensable resource for me every time I want to ask stupid questions or see candid answers about Japanese culture / way of thinking.
In the last 5 years alone, AMZN grew 4x faster than WMT. For two direct competitors with a 4x difference in growth rate, how do you think the story ends?
Growth is great until it stops.
(Not that I am complaining about it, I just think we should disabuse ourselves of this notion.)
[0] https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201210302242...
I recall in the 90’s and 00’s being able to google anything and find an answer on a forum or Yahoo Answers. Now all that is last and all google queries return spam sites with bad answers and tons of ads.
Yes. Just dot in symbol.
https://answers.yahoo.com/activity/questions?show=AA11447210
Yahoo Answers matters more to culture than any New York Times trend piece.
This just isn't true, for the simplest possible reason: there's more preserved literature than there is preserved graffiti. It also isn't true for the slightly less simple reason that the literature covers a much wider range of topics.
What historians desire most is driven by what they don't have now. Cuneiform tablets are so numerous that they mostly just sit around untranslated. Would they be informative if we did translate them? Of course, but the manpower isn't there. Identical documents from 3rd-century Germany would be an epic, multiple-career-making find. Those would be translated immediately.
We value things the same way. Yahoo Answers is worthless to us because we have infinite amounts of similar material, so there's no cost to destroying this subset of it.
You could try to argue that Yahoo Answers has great future value, and we should therefore preserve it, but if we followed that advice, Yahoo Answers would have no future value, because so much content like it would have been preserved. This approach fails to be logically coherent.
And that’s before you include the likes of Wikipedia, which it’s inconceivable won’t be recorded in at least some form. We will have a pretty good record of our civilization to work with - down to the minutest cultural ephemera.
It sort of makes me sad for the internet bygone. I really miss the fact that nearly every product had a half dozen fan pages dedicated to it. Things like https://www.massassi.net/ were amazing back in their hayday. Now everything it consolidated into big social media locations :(
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26654258
Phrases like "the algorithm" have started showing up in all kinds of videos and texts, not just in tech-centric ones. They had to, now that said algorithm is tied to the ability of certain people to make money and survive. The effect that Big Tech has on our lives and on human history is becoming more and more profound.
Take Native American culture for example. If we could, we would prefer actual historical events written down than just stories that's pass down through word of mouth.
There are 400 (!!!) "partners" listed just for personalized ads!
It is a historical part of the Internet that should be available for research. I think there should be a law to force companies to move public data to public domain and make it available to download.
Otherwise we just loose history of our times chunk by chunk. This is unprecedenced taking into an account it was never easier to backup and store such pieces of public data.
> Your Yahoo Answers data download will return all user-generated content including your Questions list, Questions, Answers list, Answers, and any images. You won't be able to download other users' content, questions, or answers.
I guess not. Shame.
At least, on their front page they do not hint at any such intention: https://chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/
[1] https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080211063124A...
That it became an alt-right cesspit is a terrible shame. It was a silly place but it deserves a better place in internet history than that.
It comes done to how whell you parend the chiyelld. Good parendets explain to the chyelld how babby is achivet.
Y!A was precise in lots of things. They should have just reinvented, u mean just change the webdesign and restarted it.
Yahoo has lots of bests not sure why they are falling. Yeah they made really bad acquisitions, but it can be re-engineered to work.
The daily digest Quora sends me almost always has a couple interesting questions or so with informative answers for me. It never had ones like you describe.
I wonder why we are getting such different questions/answers?
Simple up/down voting systems are too easily gamed
This sadly reminds me of what happened with the Yahoo Groups shutdown.
Ive got to say though, good riddance.
They run a popular service for free for years and then shut it down because they don’t make any money.
> How is babby formed?
> how is babby formed
> how girl get pragnent
Let's at least try to preserve this gem accurately for future archaeologists. It should make it easier for future humans to wrap their heads around why we are in the state we're in.
Love it.
Source:
Dude just trust me