Answers won’t be coming from Yahoo anymore
We were watching HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” a couple of weeks ago when host John Oliver presented a segment about how Yahoo! Answers is shutting down this week.
Started in 2005, it’s a communitydriven question-and-answer website that invites users to submit questions, answer questions from other users, and vote for previously submitted questions and answers to increase their visibility.
According to its website, Yahoo! Answers will no longer exist as of Tuesday. Since April 20, the website has been in read-only mode.
The decision to shutter the site comes down to sinking usage numbers. “While Yahoo! Answers was once a key part of Yahoo’s products and services, it has become less popular over the years as the needs of our members have changed,” the company diplomatically says in a message to users.
I”d heard about this end-times story on NPR recently. My husband Philip was amused by some of the examples of truly goofy questions said to have been posted on Yahoo! Answers that were shared by “Last Week Tonight.”
“They probably made those up,” he said.
“Are you kidding?” I responded, reminding him of a line from “Banditos,” one of our favorite Refreshments songs: Everybody knows/that the world is full of stupid people …
Sure, there are contributors trying to boost the outrage factor with idiotic questions; why wouldn’t they? But it’s conceivable that someone really did wonder the following (grammar and punctuation is that of the posting parties):
■ Farewell STD from dog is it possible?
■ Does the movie Air Bud paint an unrealistic picture of even the most athletic dog’s potential basketball skill?
■ My dad is a goth; what do I do?
■ Why wasn’t I born an octopus?
Among NPR’s examples: Can you boil your earphones? Can you fall in love with a potato?
Freelance writer Luke Winkie of Austin, Texas, who mentions one of his favorite questions, “Will my laptop get heavier if I put more files on it?,” in the NPR story, calls Yahoo! Answers the most earnest place on the Internet.
“You read it, and you’re not sure if it’s someone kind of just making a joke, or if it’s someone who is genuinely curious about this.”
Daniel Victor, in his April 6 piece in The New York Times, says the site “helped people identify their sense of self: Why do people with baguettes think they are better than me? Is being popular in high school a good skill I can use in a job interview?
“It sought explanations for the unexplainable: Smoke coming from my belly button? Why is everything at my grandma’s house moist?
“And it gave air to gaps in knowledge and admissions that perhaps had nowhere else to go: What does a hug feel like?”
Not everyone is so charitable. BuzzFeed News, Victor reports, recently called Yahoo! Answers “one of the dumbest places on the Internet. Vulture said it was ‘populated entirely with Batman villains, aliens pretending to be human, and that one weird neighbor you’d rather climb down your fire escape in a blizzard than get caught in a conversation with.”
Expertise was not required to answer questions, he says, and little was displayed.
“But the site clearly was seen by some people, including children, as a comfortable space to ask the questions—sometimes important ones—they’d never dare to ask friends, families and teachers.”
“Yahoo! Answers is what we feared would happen,” said Drew Davenport of Camarillo, Calif. “You got real human reaction, for better or for worse.”
Justin McElroy, co-host of comedy podcast “My Brother, My Brother and Me,” which has featured questions from the Yahoo service since 2010, tells the Times, “I think you get into trouble when you think no actual person would be wondering that, because people wonder about lots of things. You don’t want to put limits on the depths of humanity’s curiosity-slash-ignorance.”
He shares a few of more than 1,700 Yahoo! Answers questions that have been showcased on his podcast:
■ How to get a haircut similar to Joseph Stalin without showing the girl who cuts my hair a picture of Joseph Stalin?
■ I accidentally ate the Do Not Eat packet inside my shoe box. Am I gonna die?
■ Why doesn’t the Grand Canyon have rides?
■ In the TV show Friends, what was the point of Ross?
■ Did dragons live before, during, or after dinosaurs?
And possibly the best-known question ever to appear (in its actual onsite form): How is babby formed?
If you have to ask …