I used it in college before Wolfram Alpha and Stack Overflow were popular. "How is babby made" seems to be the median quality content there.

It's like 4chan.

Sometimes there's some good content, but you gotta wade through the 99% sewage to see any of it.

I have a hard time believing that the value of the content exceeds the resource cost of archiving it.

The problem with Q&A sites of any stripe is that the "good" content gets generated early. People ask meaningful questions and get meaningful answers.

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.

beside the historycal antropological value, and all the associated hilarity, there is very little content worth saving

even if I hadn't been there to know for myself, Sturgeon's Law would seem to be applicable.