Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4

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Originally published at: Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4 | Boing Boing

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Better ask lots of questions while we still can.

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As usual, nothing is being preserved or archived by the owning company despite the nominal cost of doing so. Yes, most of the answers were hilariously bad and many of the questions horribly misguided, but this could be a corpus mined for a lot of value by historians, sociologists, and other academics.

This is why I’m grateful for efforts like the one that preserved Geocities and for organisations like the Internet Archive. They understand the concept of long-term value in a way that corporations like Verizon – run by MBAs who can’t see beyond the next fiscal quarter – never will.

At least we’ll never again be kept in the dark about how babby is formed.

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I made jesus shaped pancake and burnt them. Am I going to hell?

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I am sorry for your lots of questions

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Honest question: is Quora going the way of Yahoo Answers? I recall a time when it seemed like a place for serious discussion, then noticed a lot of fake questions just to promote something, and recently it seems like any other “wide open” place on the internet, full of random opinions.

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am i pregnint?

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Yes, yes u is.

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Am I… gregnant???

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Nah, u good.

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We’ll still leave a bigger blob of historical text, if only through sheer starting volume; but there is something ignominious about the sheer percentage of the loss that will be essentially discretionary.

This isn’t monks making palimpsests because vellum is serious business, or barbarians burning down the library; just the judgement that stuff is worth even less than pervasive consumer analytics or whatever Yahoo is storing.

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All Boys Are Bastards.

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Am i pegnate? Help!?

For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure:

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Yoda version: All Boys Bastards Are. ABBA.

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I always thought “Yahoo Answers” was the most appropriate page name on the tubes.

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Yahoo, isn’t that that shady search engine that appears in my browser’s search bar every time my Java Runtime Engine has updated?

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Ask yahoo questions, get yahoo answers.

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So is MBMBAM getting cancelled?

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Remember when Yahoo Serious sued Yahoo!?

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I noticed that too. Some people spam Quora with copy-paste questions, changing one word or so. Others look like clickbait (“What are some facts nobody knows about ___?”). Answers are rated by entertainment value (you must write an essay, preferably with humor and photos) rather than correctness and effectiveness.

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