[HN Gopher] Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021
___________________________________________________________________
Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021
Author : Gaessaki
Score : 192 points
Date : 2021-04-05 16:26 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (uk.help.yahoo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (uk.help.yahoo.com)
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I do think it's interesting that we call the Web the "repository
| of human knowledge" when clearly everything is temporary, and
| you'd do better to buy a book on most subjects.
|
| (Not that I am complaining about it, I just think we should
| disabuse ourselves of this notion.)
| [deleted]
| astockwell wrote:
| "...and thousands of physics/chemistry students all cried out at
| once, and then were silenced."
| bliteben wrote:
| Looking back Yahoo is going to seem like an elaborate scam to
| extract money from stockholders.
| OakNinja wrote:
| Yahoo's problem is mainly that they don't seem to know how to get
| paid and what to get paid for.
|
| They run a popular service for free for years and then shut it
| down because they don't make any money.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Though I'm not a user and never liked the service myself, I'd
| like it to be preserved. It is part of internet history. Let's
| not let happen to answers what happened to geocities.
| luhn wrote:
| Unfortunately Verizon has shown itself to be unwilling to work
| with Internet Archive and others that want to preserve this
| history. When Yahoo Groups shut down couple years ago, Verizon
| made no effort to help the archival and actually banned
| accounts that were attempting to scrape data.
|
| https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/yahoo-groups-is-ending-...
| dwighttk wrote:
| Some things aren't worth saving.
| DC1350 wrote:
| Yahoo answers is the reason I was insecure about not having an
| average 8 inch penis when I was 11 years old. It was probably the
| lowest quality forum that I've ever seen and I'm glad to hear
| it's shutting down.
| gotostatement wrote:
| I am truley sorry for your lots
| DC1350 wrote:
| Thanks
| hota_mazi wrote:
| Oh no! How are new generations going to learn how babbies are
| formed?
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Dang. I learned better posting skills at YA. Specifically, I
| learned to create more concise answers, quickly.
|
| My proving ground was the religious answers group, where I went
| head to head with the dominant anti-faith trolls.
| particulars02 wrote:
| but....HOW IS BABBY FORMED?
| amyjess wrote:
| My main experience with Yahoo! Answers is that it's more of a
| trolling platform than anything else. The questions are trolls,
| and the answers are trolls.
|
| Nevertheless, I'm going to miss it. The trolling was fun to read,
| at least.
| judge2020 wrote:
| https://youtu.be/EShUeudtaFg
| sjcsjc wrote:
| https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201009300839.
| ..
|
| Best question I'm aware of on Yahoo Answers. And the infinite
| loop response is the best answer.
| IncRnd wrote:
| That is worrisome. If I get my wife's baby's baby pregnant
| (please read the linked post before commenting!), in the
| case that the little one needs a C-section, will that harm
| her mother, grandma, or my wife?
| jedberg wrote:
| Yes.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Did this come before or after the "how babby formed" meme?
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-is-babby-formed
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| Thank you! This was hilarious!
|
| 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.
| eppsilon wrote:
| There's a podcast called My Brother My Brother and Me where
| they find ridiculous Yahoo Answers questions and respond
| with "advice".
| andybak wrote:
| There's several hundred subreddits that would do the trick.
| CynicusRex wrote:
| Haha, the first comment I thought of was "But how will I find
| out if I'm pregante?"
| ehsankia wrote:
| Is that the experience of someone who actively used it for a
| period of time or of someone who just heard of it offhandedly.
| The latter would clearly only hear of the memes and trolling,
| since those bubble out much more than helpful answers.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| My Brother, My Brother and Me shared all the best with a
| regular roster of volunteer Yahoo miners credited for the
| questions.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Except in Japan where it's basically Stack Overflow for some
| reason
| beardedscotsman wrote:
| Yahoo Japan was a JV between Yahoo and SoftBank. It's pretty
| much a huge if not the biggest platform in Japan because of
| this. Yahoo Japan is not the same as yahoo globally.
| qalmakka wrote:
| Japan it's basically it's own little world. Their local
| version of Yahoo is not only still very popular, but it looks
| like it's stuck in the early '00s for some inexplicable
| reason.
| ladberg wrote:
| I think most Japanese websites look like that for some
| reason.
| Hamuko wrote:
| They're pretty decent now (apart from legacy) but it
| feels like 2004 lasted until about 2013 when it came to
| Japanese websites.
| justplay wrote:
| Although I don't use it, hearing that Yahoo Answers is shutting
| down, I am upset. It feels like the internet became an utterly
| different place.
| mitjak wrote:
| how is babby formed
| xnx wrote:
| The complete endeavor of Yahoo was all worth it for the
| creation of this video alone:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EShUeudtaFg
| carols10cents wrote:
| how girl get archeived?
| canjobear wrote:
| When I opened the comments the first thing I did was Ctrl-F
| "babby"
| vmception wrote:
| we need to do way abstain mother
| thirtyseven wrote:
| Rough year for the McElroys, huh?
| twobitshifter wrote:
| The answers idea has been tried by many and it's the quality of
| the answers that matters most, but this is presumably out of the
| developers control. If you have yahoo answers, quora, metafilter,
| askReddit, and stackoverflow, the primary differences in my mind
| are the website cultures. Quora has apparently developed a very
| pro CCP slant lately, not something the developers intended (one
| hopes.) it also seems to be den of self promotion. Stackoverflow
| is genuinely useful for experts, but has many memes about the
| type of answers one can expect to a beginner question. Ask Reddit
| is not a place that you can expect to get an answer if it's not
| interesting enough to gain upvotes or be made fun of. Yahoo
| answers tried to provide a simple Q&A format, but both the
| quality of questions and answers were unsatisfying (how is baby
| formed).
| vforvendettador wrote:
| It's been long superseded by various similar platform. I used to
| use Yahoo Answers in their heyday but the quality of questions
| and answers never up to scratch and it's a spiral down to
| obscurity.
| keeganjw wrote:
| What does this mean for My Brother, My Brother, and Me...
| Griffin's gonna be bummed.
| easton wrote:
| It had to end sometime, I suppose. Maybe they'll pull a archive
| somehow.
| MivLives wrote:
| They have been doing more viewer questions. Or no questions
| at all recently.
| miralize wrote:
| The "The War with Grandpa" episode will live in infamy
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's a sad year for McElroy listeners. Between this and
| Graduation, I'm not sure there will be anything left after
| 2021.
| RootReducer wrote:
| They've only been doing one or even no Yahoo questions per
| episode for a while now. I almost suspect this will relieve
| them and give then an "out" to pivot to different formats.
| didip wrote:
| Random trivia: Larry Page's brother Carl Page sold eGroups to
| Yahoo for $432 million which then turned into Yahoo Answers.
| neonate wrote:
| You mean Yahoo Groups, yes? Also shut down recently.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGroups
| didip wrote:
| ooo that's right. I somehow thought Yahoo Answers evolved
| from Yahoo Groups.
| unixhero wrote:
| They don't list the reason for *why*
| [deleted]
| alex_g wrote:
| Gonna have to archive this one for Franc R's gem of a
| contribution
| https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080603191133A...
| themadprogramer wrote:
| Am I pregant? That will be all:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgckQGnFEAI
| tomaszs wrote:
| It is sad to hear Yahoo didn't take responsible steps to preserve
| the content of the service for future generations.
|
| 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.
| jdlyga wrote:
| Yahoo gets rid of some of their best services. Yahoo Geolocation
| Service, besides Google which was license restricted, was the
| most accurate service for putting in an address and getting
| latitude/longitude coordinates. But they sadly shut it down.
|
| I sure hope they don't shut down Yahoo Finance. It's the best
| thing that Yahoo currently has.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| How about the treasure trove that was geocities?
| jethro_tell wrote:
| my stocks widget says that it's switching off finance (probably
| API?) next update because it's being discontinued. I have not
| validated that. I mostly use alpha vantage for my own projects
| now since finance (API) was down for a while.
| kristianc wrote:
| > Yahoo gets rid of some of their best services.
|
| This was not one of them.
| echelon wrote:
| The most memorable thing from Yahoo Answers is the "how is
| babby formed" meme.
|
| It never attracted high quality Q&A, and was a joke from day
| one.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| https://youtu.be/Ll-lia-FEIY
|
| Still makes me laugh
| brudgers wrote:
| The upside of the question is it was an example for
| StackOverflow...a negative example of course. Spolsky talks
| about it all the time in the early StackOverflow podcasts.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I think they were better than expertsexchange at least.
| It was low quality but it was simple and free to access.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I mean, is it really any worse than Quora? I will miss it.
| challengly wrote:
| Yeah, though it was their funniest service.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| The mismanagement of yahoo/oath/Verizon assets has been
| stunning. What a waste. Marissa Meyer started it. Her exit and
| the Verizon acquisition accelerated it. Now they are a husk of
| early web properties when they could have been an Amazon with
| the right leadership.
| laurent92 wrote:
| I don't understand what Yahoo is supposed to be. Suddenly in
| 2015, they have the genius step of publishing an email UI on
| paar with Gmail, as they should have done about 10 years
| earlier. But unless you are using their email, what _is_
| Yahoo? For me it is a weather widget and a news feed. Not
| counting Yahoo Finance because other comments say it's
| shutting down. So what is the core business of Yahoo? A news
| corp that repeats Reuters, but without the TV front-end that
| CNN has, and without the journalists that the Washington Post
| has?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| How about a new venture? Like building an alternative to
| the Apple App Store and Google Play? Then going to Congress
| to complain about default installation on the devices (or
| any sort of installation at all).
|
| They have the name recognition to pull off something like
| this.
| caddemon wrote:
| I don't know what they're trying to be, but outside of
| Yahoo Finance the only other thing I'm aware of people
| using Yahoo for these days is fantasy sports. One of the
| fantasy football leagues I do every year still uses Yahoo,
| and other friends that play fantasy seem to report similar.
| But I don't know what the numbers actually are because it's
| true Yahoo doesn't seem to lean into that role much.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I can't answer that for today. But there was a time when
| they had a very active shopping site -- they were an
| earlier version of Amazon for 3rd-party merchants, Shopify
| or Etsy where anyone could open a "store". And Yahoo
| handled payments, as I recall, just like Amazon does now. I
| bought many things from there.
|
| 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.
| rdiddly wrote:
| They seem to be trying to be nothing at all, and getting
| closer with each passing year!
| Fordec wrote:
| Meyer didn't _start_ it, but she did put distinctly more
| marketing and hype into her role than predecessors which
| shone a brighter spotlight on the already ensuing downfall. I
| 'd be more inclined to pinpoint the start of it to sometime
| around Jerry Yang's departure and the revolving door of CEOs
| between him and Mayer when their tenure was more akin to
| flailing than building leadership.
| perardi wrote:
| Oh, I wouldn't start that downfall during Marissa Meyer's
| reign of error.
|
| 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...
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Ha, good point. Seems like ex-CEO Scott Thompson is doing
| ok these days:
|
| 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.
| koboll wrote:
| I don't really understand the argument here. How is
| sunsetting Answers related to mismanagement?
|
| 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".
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > How is sunsetting Answers related to mismanagement?
|
| My post was a general statement and not directed at any
| singular Yahoo product.
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| Quick, we need to get Archive.org on the case. /sarcasm
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26703203
| news_to_me wrote:
| Why sarcasm? Yahoo Answers represents an important slice of
| online culture from the early 2000s. Are our kids supposed to
| just believe us when we tell them how babby is formed[1]?
|
| [1]
| https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080211063124A...
| causality0 wrote:
| Yahoo Answers served as a social network for kids shortly
| after chatroom culture died. It was particularly the home of
| underrepresented and oppressed groups, like LGBT youth and
| minority religions. I spent time there as a teenager and saw
| a huge number of people ask about things and talk about
| things they couldn't in real life. Gay kids trying to figure
| out their place. Muslim kids questioning things they'd been
| taught. Terrified kids going through a pregnancy scare
| looking for guidance and reassurance.
|
| 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.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > Are our kids supposed to just believe us when we tell them
| how babby is formed[1]?
|
| It comes done to how whell you parend the chiyelld. Good
| parendets explain to the chyelld how babby is achivet.
| dwighttk wrote:
| They're around... they know you know how babby is formed
| ravenstine wrote:
| Finally! Although search engines have finally deranked Yahoo
| Answers, I still resent it for all the years when I would look up
| something and the top results always included a Yahoo Answer
| written by a 12 year old. It's pretty much a warehouse of
| misinformation to such a degree that it makes Quora look like
| Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of credibility.
| [deleted]
| markdown wrote:
| > it makes Quora look like Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of
| credibility.
|
| Have you looked recently? Quora is mostly online marketers.
| Only marginally better than 12yr olds.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| At least you could actually read the answers, unlike, say,
| expertsexchange.com
| DC-3 wrote:
| Hey! My brother used to write answers to maths questions on
| Yahoo Answers when he was 12 and they were quite good, I think
| :-)
| umvi wrote:
| > still resent it for all the years when I would look up
| something and the top results always included a Yahoo Answer
| written by a 12 year old
|
| Reminds me of the famous(ish) meme that came from Yahoo
| Answers: https://youtu.be/Ll-lia-FEIY
| simias wrote:
| I'm partial to this one myself: https://youtu.be/EShUeudtaFg
| pdimitar wrote:
| Will there be an archive somewhere?
| GormanFletcher wrote:
| For read-heavy content sites like Yahoo Answers, I wonder why
| they get shut down instead of getting compiled into pregenerated
| static HTML and hosted as read-only.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| You could throw a few ad scripts on them and even make a little
| money (likely more than the tiny hosting costs for static
| content).
|
| I agree: Strange choice. But as is the world of large
| corporations and decision-making.
| slugiscool99 wrote:
| Looks like it was could have been political reasons? See
| https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20210405224547A...
| whatyesaid wrote:
| I think Yahoo Answers was highly indexed by Google in like
| 2010.
|
| 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.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| This would still be an ongoing product that would need
| integration into the current ad networks; security reviews;
| patches to the servers; OS upgrades; legal support (copyright,
| abuse, and right-to-be-forgotten claims); accessibility
| support; and probably a few other things I can't think of. It
| could be done, maybe for a profit, but how big a profit? My
| guess is any potential advocate inside Yahoo! has bigger fish
| to fry.
| blackearl wrote:
| Are there any real answers of value on there? I know there's
| plenty of hilarious questions like the classic "how is babby
| formed?" but I wouldn't ever consider Yahoo! Answers a
| legitimate source for anything.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| A couple Yahoo product shutdowns supposedly happened because no
| one wanted to touch the code anymore. I've seen the same thing
| in much smaller product companies--the Elm app, the old Rails
| app after all the Ruby developers left, etc.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| My bet would be that no management at Yahoo wanted to own that.
| It'd just be a slow down-and-to-the-right graph over time.
| There'd be absolutely no upside to having your name attached to
| the project, and any engineer who volunteered who be stuck
| maintaining it forever with no hope of promotion.
|
| 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.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Then why not sell it?
| bhupy wrote:
| > corporations aren't people. If something isn't advantageous
| to at least one individual decision maker, it won't happen.
|
| 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.
| unchocked wrote:
| Corporations, like Indians and men, are groups consisting
| of people. Corporations, unlike Indians and men, also have
| the legal status of "personhood".
| bhupy wrote:
| > Corporations, unlike Indians and men, also have the
| legal status of "personhood"
|
| This is purely a semantic argument. At least in America,
| Corporations aren't classified as "persons" in an
| official sense; rather the phrase "corporate personhood"
| refers to the ongoing legal debate over the extent to
| which rights traditionally associated with natural
| persons should also be afforded to corporations. In that
| regard, _exactly_ like Indians and men, the rights
| traditionally associated with natural persons are also
| afforded to multiple persons acting as a group. This is
| just as true for a collection of Indians publishing
| speech about anti-Asian hate, just as it is true for a
| collection of men publishing speech about whatever it is
| they choose. Under that principle, the SCOTUS has found
| that Corporations enjoy the same rights to express
| themselves as an association.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Speculation: Penny pinching executives cutting costs as much as
| they can to juice profits before turning the ship toward
| another sale.
| wyxuan wrote:
| In any case I think I agree as Yahoo answers just became a site
| riddled with bots spamming link shorteners laden with ads. Twas
| good while it lasted though
|
| Source:
|
| Dude just trust me
| mkr-hn wrote:
| People joke like "ha-ha, let it burn!" but it's the ordinary
| folks and their creations that anthropologists desire most.
| Ancient graffiti in Rome tells you more about ancient Rome than
| privileged writings of the era.
|
| Yahoo Answers matters more to culture than any New York Times
| trend piece.
| acwan93 wrote:
| I wonder if in another 400 years some distant society will look
| at ours as the "Dark Ages" since all information is locked
| behind services that have since disappeared like Yahoo Answers,
| Geocities, AIM profiles, MySpace, and (maybe) Facebook.
| kristianc wrote:
| Unlikely. Far more (printed) books are being published today
| than at any previous time in human history - certainly more
| so than in the Dark Ages where most had neither the equipment
| nor the education to write.
|
| 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.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/books
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wonder how much of early web we have already lost. All of
| the forums, user generated content and so on just gone...
| cogman10 wrote:
| Tons. There still exists some holdouts with long histories
| (such as anandtech). That said, once upon a time nearly all
| "social media" was forums for things of interest.
|
| 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 :(
| corywatilo wrote:
| That's one positive of projects like Posthaven
| koolba wrote:
| The real problem of the proletariat is not being able to
| permanently delete their comments.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| If social networks hadn't instituted real-name policies,
| people wouldn't be so concerned about old comments, because
| those comments might be linked to pseudonyms, not their
| real names.
| Jakobeha wrote:
| Afaik that's what the internet archive is for. Hopefully they
| archive all of the content before it goes down.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Ancient graffiti in Rome tells you more about ancient Rome
| than privileged writings of the era.
|
| 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.
| simias wrote:
| They're both valuable. In linguistics for instance graffiti
| can tell you things about the language and its evolution that
| the formal language won't communicate, like how certain
| letters stop being pronounced or become pronounced
| differently. Or how some grammatical constructions shift for
| instance.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Romanes eunt domus.
| dsr_ wrote:
| ite domum, unless you're already in Rome, in which case
| sunt domum.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| how is babby formed?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Of course they're both valuable. But you cannot reasonably
| contend that the graffiti is _more_ valuable; it is much
| _less_ valuable.
|
| > In linguistics for instance graffiti can tell you things
| about the language and its evolution that the formal
| language won't communicate, like how certain letters stop
| being pronounced or become pronounced differently.
|
| This certainly doesn't apply to Latin, which survives today
| as several robust living languages. We can easily determine
| how the sounds of Latin changed without making reference to
| graffiti.
|
| (And of course, the formal literature has quite a bit to
| say on the sounds of the language, too.)
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| One reason Pompeii graffiti is valuable, is that it
| provides some absolute dating of Vulgar Latin features,
| while the modern Romance languages show only the final
| outcome without those exact dates.
|
| I think you underestimate just how grateful historical
| linguists are for popular texts beyond literary ones.
| Another example is the Novgorod birchbark letters, which
| not only shed light on old Russian but some of their
| features (found in no other source) required scholars to
| completely revise their reconstruction of Slavic
| historical phonology in general.
| esturk wrote:
| I'm not sure that statement is true. Given just one OR the
| other, which would you pick? Graffiti, or random
| chatter/expression by extension, is useful as an addition to
| privileged writing which serves as a backbone to the events of
| history. Without the latter, the former isn't nearly as
| interesting.
|
| 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.
| perardi wrote:
| If by "ordinary folks" you mean "spam bots", then yes, our
| anthropologist weakly godlike artificial intelligences will
| appreciate this catalog.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Spam bots are one half of the decades-long battle between
| people looking for a quick buck and people trying to
| communicate. It's a huge part of the story of the last few
| decades of technology. It's right up there with the push and
| pull of progress of weapons and armor technology. How could
| that not be valuable?
| Animats wrote:
| Why is Yahoo even still around? They got rid of search. They got
| rid of the directory. They sold Alibaba. What are they still
| doing, if anything?
|
| 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...
| lesdeuxmagots wrote:
| Yahoo still makes billions in revenue every year. And the vast
| majority is not from finance or sports.
|
| 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.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Have anything to back that up? I find it very hard to
| believe. Even the boomers I know don't ever use it. Is Yahoo
| popular in some other country?
| oblio wrote:
| https://www.alexa.com/topsites
|
| 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 :-)
| markdown wrote:
| > I would say that Reddit, despite its popularity, is
| notoriously mismanaged
|
| That's what an MBA would say.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| I got my Yahoo Mail address in 1996 because teenage me thought
| my address @yahoo.com would be so cool. Nowadays I use it just
| for online shops, etc (I also use it for Facebook, which is a
| bad idea, because online shops upload their customer info to
| Facebook and, tada, guess whose profile matches for targetted
| advertising). Today I logged in and a stupid ad popped up (I
| wish I can remember what it was for). When I do a password
| reset on one of these shops, Yahoo also recognizes those kinds
| of emails and recommends LastPass or whatever password service
| they bought.
|
| 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.
| dwighttk wrote:
| I helped a person get back into their yahoo mail account and
| the web interface showed auto playing video ads with sound. I
| recommended they get a different account or at least use IMAP
| to check mail, but they were not interested.
| abhgh wrote:
| I was scrolling down the comments to see if someone has this
| problem...they lost my mail too. No way to recover it then,
| huh? This is sad.
| sennacy wrote:
| I had this unfortunate realization the other day as well.
|
| It seems like if you haven't used it in 12 months they just
| delete all your old emails. No warning whatsoever.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| Yahoo as a brand is probably still worth something. Its a grand
| father from dotcom bubble that people still recognized. Yahoo
| still provided a lot of services that people use like Yahoo
| email for example.
| ravenstine wrote:
| That's a depreciating item, perhaps rapidly so, now that more
| and more users aren't people who were alive during the dotcom
| boom.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| There are actually many quality yahoo products, not yahoo
| sports and yahoo finance are very widely used. Yahoo finance is
| a mini Bloomberg terminal at this point.
| twiddling wrote:
| Their fantasy sports platform?
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Shutdown Corner has been my favorite source of reasoned NFL
| power rankings for the last seven years if that counts for
| anything.
| boplicity wrote:
| Verizon, as part of their ownership of Yahoo and AOL, controls
| a significant proportion of email inboxes. There is quite a lot
| of strategic value in that. They've been particularly bad, from
| my perspective, in terms of allowing our emails to get through,
| but I shudder at the thought of email being under 90% control
| by Google.
| perardi wrote:
| This would be my gut reaction, but for whatever it's worth, and
| however they create this metric: Alexa says they're #11 in
| "global internet engagement".
|
| 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.
| terse_malvolio wrote:
| When multiple parrot the same 'how is babby formed' meme it makes
| me think the forum has been invaded by bird people simply echoing
| the songs they know. Maybe birds and humans aren't so different
| after all. Squawk?
|
| Curious what answers HN found interesting? Algolia Search:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fanswers.yahoo.com%2F
| com2kid wrote:
| Completely off topic: That is the longest list of "framework
| partners" that I have ever denied access to.
|
| There are 400 (!!!) "partners" listed just for personalized ads!
| aviraldg wrote:
| Does this include Yahoo Answers Japan (which I believe is still
| quite active)?
| SteveGerencser wrote:
| Just think of all those low quality links placed there for SEO
| reasons that are about to vanish.
| js4ever wrote:
| May the 4th be with them forever
| tyingq wrote:
| I do miss Yahoo! Pipes. I don't believe I'll miss Yahoo! Answers
| though. The questions they are curating on the front page are
| still terrible ones.
| llacb47 wrote:
| Sad. Yahoo no longer wants to be responsible for hosting any UGC,
| they would rather sell ads.
| water8 wrote:
| UGC is what keeps yahoo alive. It's definitely not the
| journalism.
| endisneigh wrote:
| My favorite question on YA
|
| https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090226170437A...
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I liked
| https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091211104107A...
| robbyking wrote:
| "They need to do way instain mother who kill their babbys."
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2017/03/how-i...
| brassattax wrote:
| Off-topic but I love that the timestamp on that says "1 decade
| ago"
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Hah, yes. It sort of assumes the page will be around for more
| than 1 decade, doesn't it?
| zild3d wrote:
| hm how so? I just assumed they're using something like
| moment for relative time
| https://momentjs.com/docs/#/displaying/fromnow/
| myself248 wrote:
| Ugh, I haaaaaaaaaate this habit of masking real timestamps
| and making them progressively worse.
|
| 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.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| They at least put the real time and date the question was
| posted in the headers.
|
| <meta property="og:question:published_time"
| content="2009-02-26T17:04:37Z">
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Many sites also put it in the title text (tooltip, i.e.,
| hover / long press). When that fails, I often find it by
| inspecting the element and looking at every attribute of
| the elements within 1 level on the tree. Horrible
| experience.
| com2kid wrote:
| Public libraries aren't a thing in many countries. The reason
| North America has a tradition of public libraries is that one
| of the richest men of the 20th century decided to leave behind
| a legacy of literacy [1]. Prior to that, quite a few protestant
| groups were big on literacy and invented the idea of public
| libraries for all.
|
| 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
| ...
| space_fountain wrote:
| For one example of this currently, here's what comes up when
| I search for Amsterdam Public library:
| https://www.oba.nl/service/word-lid.html (it also matches my
| memory of walking around the big public library in
| Amsterdam).
|
| 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
| thinkafterbef wrote:
| 4.1M clicks about to go down. https://i.imgur.com/0pxHInh.png
| tyingq wrote:
| And a bunch of scrapers trying to make a copies of it with lots
| of terrible domain name ideas.
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