[HN Gopher] Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021
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Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021
Author : Gaessaki
Score : 549 points
Date : 2021-04-05 16:26 UTC (1 days 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.)
| aerovistae wrote:
| First they came for GeoCities, and I didn't say anything because
| I don't use GeoCities. Then they came for AIM, and I didn't say
| anything because I don't use AIM. Then they came for Yahoo
| Answers, and I didn't say anything because I don't use Yahoo
| Answers. Then they came for an app I cared about, and there was
| nobody left to say anything.
| Safety1stClyde wrote:
| What did you want them to say?
| aerovistae wrote:
| It was just a joke, I didn't really mean anything.
| nicbou wrote:
| "I'm moving to reddit!"
| newsbinator wrote:
| What happens when they come for old.reddit.com or
| i.reddit.com?
| alsarea3 wrote:
| Does Yahoo have an app that you care about?
| whenlambo wrote:
| Being always inspired by online communication, I've recently
| launched casual Q&A website https://ffun.io
| [deleted]
| astockwell wrote:
| "...and thousands of physics/chemistry students all cried out at
| once, and then were silenced."
| teekert wrote:
| Oh no! We may loose this gem [0], thankfully we have the internet
| archive.
|
| [0]
| https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201210302242...
| stefs wrote:
| without yahoo answers this gem wouldn't have been possible:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EShUeudtaFg
| teekert wrote:
| Ah, I revisit that once every couple of years and it is about
| that time, always puts a smile on my face.
| 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.
| ataylor32 wrote:
| There have been multiple links to the "how is prangent formed"
| video, but let's not forget about the "Curse of The Weggy Board"
| video:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15nNY7uofNw
| 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| Tell that to the future historians.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Gladly, but my comment probably won't make it to the future
| because it will be voted down, proving its correctness.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Paradoxical then that as your comment won't be worth
| preserving this makes it worth preserving?
| brainless wrote:
| No, voting down your comment does not mean it is correct.
| It means the voters (vote downers) disagree with it and
| are expressing that. You must not be smart enough to get
| that. But anyhow.
| ramblerman wrote:
| Oof, What a mess it would be to have to dredge through
| terrabytes of online forum posts, tweets, and other
| nonsense.
|
| 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.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Language researchers will definitely have use for it.
| 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.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| and then the penis clapped
| 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?
| cung wrote:
| Why is person-to-person knowledge being replaced with company-to-
| person?
|
| 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.
| visarga wrote:
| Google came up with pagerank, that made developers do one of
| two things - ignore it or start SEO-ing their websites. Over
| the years, the original sites were replaced with SEO enhanced
| sites, which are often salads of links and keywords.
| anonytrary wrote:
| Will they at least keep existing pages up as static content for
| historical and archival purposes? Yahoo Answers had some really
| useful comments on it.
|
| > 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.
| imvetri wrote:
| Train AI on its data. There wont be a need for archiving.
| hkt wrote:
| how is singgularritty 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.
| GolDDranks wrote:
| I was scared that the Japanese version, Yahoo Chiebukuro would
| shut down also, but at least at the moment it seems to be only
| the English version that's shutting down.
|
| 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.
| 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.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Then, this should definitely be called an infinite
| regress instead of an infinite loop.
| userbinator wrote:
| I knew what that would be before I clicked on it.
|
| 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.
| 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.
| dceddia wrote:
| Not video, but bash.org has some great exchanges.
|
| Like the hunter2 one: http://bash.org/?244321
| easton wrote:
| I think it knows, I clicked random and got this one:
| http://bash.org/?1824
| matsemann wrote:
| KenM, perhaps? https://www.reddit.com/r/KenM/
|
| And then people also post stuff in the same vein:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/NotKenM/
| 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.
| Nadya wrote:
| Because most people accessed the internet on their
| clamshell phones and not through a PC/laptop. So most
| websites were designed to be mostly text and easily
| browsed from clamshell-phone internet browsers. Now that
| smartphones have become ubiquitous more sites are finally
| being designed to look nice on smartphones - sometimes
| still at the consequence of desktop use. It took a few
| years after the iPhone release (aka: for it to get
| widespread market adoption) for JP websites to start
| "catching up" with Western web design.
|
| There are some other reasons too - but I'd wager the
| above is the #1 reason and others are more of an "in
| addition to that" type thing.
|
| More info: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-
| design-is-so-differe...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| It is absolutely amazing how simultaneously ahead of the
| curve and behind the times Japan was. Galapagos syndrome
| reigns supreme.
| 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.
| afterburner wrote:
| Japan gets a rep for being technologically forward
| thinking, but given their heavy use of faxes and paper
| records in banking and government, they seem to have shown
| they are very slow to move forward in broad ways.
| lmm wrote:
| It's not Japan's web design that confuses me, it's the rest
| of the world. Since the late '00s it seems like removing
| half of your content and replacing it with larger fonts,
| huge margins and just blank space became the cool thing to
| do.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Someone somewhere said of content "let it breathe" and
| that got repeated until breathing content became a cargo
| cult. That cargo cult summoned the demons of flat design.
| They brought with them Metro, Material Design, Bootstrap
| 3, and iOS 7.
|
| Content started breathing heavily, fonts got almost too
| skinny to read, and it's almost impossible to tell if
| text a button.
| totetsu wrote:
| Yahoo maps Japan is much better than google maps because it
| follows the Japanese system of numbering buildings not
| streets more closely.
| fomine3 wrote:
| Yahoo! JAPAN is most familiar website brand for older
| people, but not very well for younger people. Maybe they
| use apps like Twitter, Instagram, and LINE rather than
| websites. I think that's why their design isn't refined.
| henearkr wrote:
| The Japanese version will not be closed. It's called
| Chiebukuro, and it looks like it will continue as it is:
| https://chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/
| 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.
| plumsempy wrote:
| This reminds me of a couple of cute Yahoo! answers story.
|
| 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.
| sn_master wrote:
| Few university assignments I had ended up on Yahoo! Answers
| too.
| realchucknorris wrote:
| i hope Manjunath reads this. he would be very proud
| 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
| [deleted]
| 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
| spiralganglion wrote:
| It means Griffin is going to read a _final_ Yahoo.
| 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.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| This feel very similar to IMDB shutting down their forums. Did I
| use the service very often? No. Was the service even very good?
| Not really. Do I want it to exist? Absolutely.
| sadfev wrote:
| No! They were such a cesspool and also internet history!
| 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.
| aerosmile wrote:
| I still remember all the Techcrunch posts in 2006 when it became
| clear that Yahoo Answers was beating Google Answers [0]. Back
| then, Google was killing Yahoo in the same way that Amazon is
| killing Walmart today - very publicly and brutally, despite
| Walmart (and back then Yahoo) putting on a brave face and telling
| everyone that it can avoid the inevitable. So when Yahoo scored a
| tiny little victory, they celebrated it like it was the beginning
| of a new era. I imagine that Walmart would do the same today if
| the public gave them credit for building a better automated CX
| bot or scoring some other interesting but immaterial win.
|
| [0] https://techcrunch.com/2006/11/30/yahoos-big-win/
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Amazon is killing Walmart?
| aerosmile wrote:
| I didn't realize that was up for debate. But I suppose in
| 2006, not everyone agreed that Google was killing Yahoo ("but
| what about their xyz, it's so much better than Google's
| xyz!!!").
|
| 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?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I wonder (honestly) if the answer is that AMZN owns remote
| and WMT owns in person?
| aerosmile wrote:
| In the long run, that would be a losing proposition for
| WMT. Kind of like where Yahoo ended up at.
| kgin wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/605/
| chandlerswift wrote:
| And here I was expecting https://xkcd.com/1102/
| aerosmile wrote:
| So I presume the message is Amazon cannot be compared to
| Walmart because it's much smaller? I love xkcd but this
| one left me confused because amzn's market cap is 4x
| larger than wmt's. So 4x larger and 4x faster growing.
| lukev wrote:
| Market cap is an expression of how much investors think a
| company's stock is worth.
|
| For an apples-to-apples comparison of real growth, you
| want to compare _revenue_, not market cap. Amazon has not
| yet passed Walmart in retail revenue (as of 2020) though
| it's true their revenue is growing much faster. Hence the
| XKCD references.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I'm not going to write an (overly) long comment on it as
| I think Amazon is in a good position for continued growth
| but not because market cap is bigger (revenue is still
| smaller, employees is still smaller, footprint is still
| smaller, groceries have been a slow burner even post
| Whole Foods) and certainly not because numbers went up
| for the last 5 years so therefore they'll just keep going
| up until all competition is buried.
|
| Also remember when looking at
| valuations/revenue/profits/growth that these mega
| companies can be extremely wide. What looks like
| massively higher profit margins turns out to be from
| Amazon Web Services driving 2/3 the operating profit not
| from store sales margins and even if it was that one
| company can sweep up a certain category of sales doesn't
| mean it'll be able to sweep all of them up.
|
| There's also nothing to say Amazon can't be outdone by
| others or can't become the source of its own demise just
| because it's done well over the last 5 years.
|
| .
|
| Anyways back to the XKCD question Amazon has experienced
| high triple digit growth in the last 5 years and still
| hasn't approached Walmart in sales/revenue. That doesn't
| mean it won't do so but that also doesn't mean the next 5
| years will be as easy to have triple digit growth,
| especially if that growth was in enabling new sales
| rather than displacing traditional sales. Similarly the
| market isn't worried about Walmart fizzling out any time
| soon like Yahoo did, to go back to traded value despite
| Amazon's meteoric rise Walmart is still valued twice as
| much over the last 5 years compared to the 15 prior where
| it sat completely flat even though Amazon wasn't much of
| a competitor at all during that time.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Grocery, real estate, antitrust tech badwill, product
| sourcing/quality, cost savings, revenue, foreign and
| emerging markets, closing online sales gap...
|
| Growth is great until it stops.
| unixhero wrote:
| They don't list the reason for *why*
| sub7 wrote:
| Quora will be them as well, nobody has figured out how to
| maintain question/answer quality at scale
|
| Simple up/down voting systems are too easily gamed
| [deleted]
| userbinator wrote:
| _When will I get my Yahoo Answers content? Our team works as fast
| as possible to make data available, but it can take up to 30 days
| to receive your content download._
|
| This sadly reminds me of what happened with the Yahoo Groups
| shutdown.
| 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
| racl101 wrote:
| The weirdest questions that you wouldn't ask on Quora ended up
| there. Like if you were interested in dating your first cousin
| for example lol.
| 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| expertsexchange had possibly the best (inadvertent?)
| double-entendre domain name ever.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Can't argue with that lol
| 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.
| SllX wrote:
| > I don't understand what Yahoo is supposed to be.
|
| The corporate equivalent of a terminal cancer patient.
|
| What it was, is aptly described here:
| http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2848
| 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.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| And bringing this full circle, I wonder if you may be
| referring to Viaweb?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb
| astrange wrote:
| They were originally a do-everything Internet company like
| Google, but without the aura of smugness and infinite
| amount of ad money. (My friend who was a Yahoo Search
| sysadmin tells me they had nearly as good results as Google
| on much, much smaller amounts of hardware expenditure.)
|
| 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.
| 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".
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > How is sunsetting Answers related to 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.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > How is sunsetting Answers related to mismanagement?
|
| My post was a general statement and not directed at any
| singular Yahoo product.
| rchaud wrote:
| I wouldn't put it all on her. Back in 2008, Yahoo refused a
| $44b acquisition offer from Microsoft.
|
| 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...
| 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.
| duskwuff wrote:
| That's the point. The content on Yahoo Answers is _so bad_
| that it makes Quora look relatively authoritative by
| contrast.
| 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
| m463 wrote:
| reminds me of the "ask a..." from the onion.
|
| 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...
| tijuco2 wrote:
| That is so sad. Long time ago I was addicted to answer I.T stuff
| there. This website was a great idea!
| pdimitar wrote:
| Will there be an archive somewhere?
| itsbits wrote:
| One of top contributers I see is . (dot)
|
| Yes. Just dot in symbol.
|
| https://answers.yahoo.com/activity/questions?show=AA11447210
| 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.
| byset wrote:
| I do remember often being frustrated when mostly useless
| Yahoo Answers content would appear at the top of Google
| search results. I never understood why it was ranked so
| highly. YA seemed like what Quora would be like if you were
| required to flunk a literacy test in order to participate.
| rchaud wrote:
| At least Yahoo! Answers entries were short. Quora is
| basically the Y!A of today, but with essay-length responses
| that don't still don't answer the question.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| And ironically quora answers now pollute google results and
| elicit similar eyerolls.
| hellomyguys wrote:
| Have you looked at Quora any time in the past 6 years? The
| answers may be grammatically correct, but the content is
| not much better than Yahoo Answers, and at least Yahoo
| Answers was funny.
| adolph wrote:
| A "bad look" to the "Yahoo!" brand? Their "brand look" has
| been value destruction for more than 15 years, hitting their
| stride early with 2005's acqui-trashing of upcomly,
| del.icio.us and Flickr.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio.
| ..!
| unreal37 wrote:
| In fact, the Google Search team has made changes to their
| algorithm over the years SPECIFICALLY to reduce crowdsourced
| answers sites from appearing in search results. It's a
| conscious decision.
| max_hammer wrote:
| Reddit / Quora / stackexchage are always top results in
| google search
| 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.
| scottmcleod wrote:
| Bad management/uninformed...Who the hell works at Yahoo?
| [deleted]
| kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote:
| Because there is a fuck ton of misinformation and outright
| incorrect info
| Spivak wrote:
| Otherwise known as a community Q/A site.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've been doing that for years to generate static web pages
| from the D newsgroups:
|
| 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.
| 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.
| patrickaljord wrote:
| > but with apologies to Mitt Romney, corporations aren't
| people
|
| 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.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| You could swap "taxes" for "regulations" in your last
| sentence and it'd be equally true - scrapping corporate
| taxed wouldn't eliminate corporate lobbying.
| jfengel wrote:
| Because if you don't do that, then rich people would just
| give their money to a corporation to "hold" for them. This
| already happens anyway, but regulations try to restrict it.
|
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| The people that work at and own the corporation get
| representation, just like people that don't. Why should
| being involved in a corporation give you more
| representation than others?
|
| In the past, land (and slave) owners got more
| representation than others. All sorts of games can be
| played (and have been) to make sure the "right" people
| control the outcome of elections.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Then why not sell it?
| criddell wrote:
| Maybe what they would get for it is less than the cost of
| selling it?
| skinnymuch wrote:
| _Edit: I think it's not worth anything positive for Yahoo
| to sell. I added the last two paragraphs._
|
| 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.
| ink_13 wrote:
| Wasn't del.icio.us sold to Pinboard?
| x0x0 wrote:
| With a detour through the ex-youtube-folks' company
| (AVOS), and then someone else. Yahoo did not sell it for
| $30k.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Yes, and that was the 5th time it had been sold.
|
| https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delici
| ous...
| xwdv wrote:
| I don't give a fuck about promotion. If Yahoo gave me a
| decent salary I'd maintain it forever. If I want more money I
| don't wait for promotions, I quit and find a better job. Jobs
| are just a way to funnel money into my investment portfolio
| which is the real money maker here.
| duskwuff wrote:
| And, from what I'm seeing on the Answers home page, a lot of
| the popular content is rather time-sensitive (like questions
| about ongoing political controversies). A lot of traffic
| would drop off _very_ quickly if the site went static.
| aerosmile wrote:
| It likely has to do with a tech stack that's being retired or
| some other technologically-driven forcing function
| (authentication, security, etc).
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://seilevel.com/requirements/11318-2
| 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 (or Diwali or Bollywood etc
| etc), 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.
| eyeinthepyramid wrote:
| Isn't the better analogy that countries aren't people? Or
| are you really arguing that America is a person as opposed
| to a collection of people?
| bhupy wrote:
| Well, taking a step back, this is all a very _very_ poor
| analogy to describe the mechanics behind why the Yahoo
| Answers team might choose not to maintain static web
| pages; bringing up Mitt Romney 's arguments in that
| context is...perplexing, to say the least (and probably
| flame-bait).
|
| But in the spirit of actually engaging with the comment,
| Mitt Romney's argument is centered around the debate
| around whether rights that are traditionally afforded to
| individuals by American law (i.e. the US Constitution)
| also extend to individuals acting in a group capacity.
| That is to say, if I got up on a soapbox and started
| preaching communism, can the US government prevent me
| from doing that? If you and I decided to create a group
| and find like-minded people and collectively use our
| resources to get up on a soapbox and started preaching
| communism, can the US government prevent us from doing
| that? The Supreme Court found that the answer to both of
| those questions is "No", and -- importantly -- that the
| answer to the latter question is "No" for the same reason
| that the answer to the former question is "No".
|
| So taking another step back, arguing that "America is a
| person" doesn't make much sense in that context, because
| the argument is about whether "America" has collective
| rights under American law; it's like dividing by 0. But
| groups _within_ the US are different; a group of
| communists talking about how dope they think Marxism is,
| in a legal sense, is exactly the same as McDonalds Inc
| talking about how dope burgers are, or Google Inc.
| talking about how dope search engines are...or even
| groups of Indians talking about how dope Shah Rukh Khan
| is. They 're all protected by the First Amendment.
| _bohm wrote:
| I think GP was just being facetious with the Mitt Romney
| comment, not trying to start a discussion about corporate
| personhood, etc., etc.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > By this logic, no collection of people can be considered
| "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.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| You're absolutely right. No collection of people is a
| person. Indians are not a person and do not act uniformly
| in the interests of India. Are you suggesting that Indians
| are some sort of hive mind?
| bhupy wrote:
| > Indians are not a person and do not act uniformly in
| the interests of India.
|
| No, but they _can act uniformly if they so choose_. That
| 's the entire point. The US Constitution doesn't ascribe
| group assignments, but the argument is that if people
| self associate into groups (non-profits, corporations,
| religions, etc) then the rights that extended to them as
| individuals also extend to them acting as a group.
|
| In other words, I'm not suggesting that Indians are some
| sort of hive mind, but if one day all of the Indians in
| America decided to Neuralink themselves into some sort of
| a hive mind, the rights that extended to each one of them
| by the US Constitution also extend to them in their hive
| mind capacity.
|
| As an Indian, I welcome this freedom!
| amelius wrote:
| > corporations aren't people.
|
| Corporations are people whenever it's advantageous to those
| corporations. In all other situations, corporations are not
| people.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Indians are people, but "India" isn't a person.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Speculation: Penny pinching executives cutting costs as much as
| they can to juice profits before turning the ship toward
| another sale.
| londons_explore wrote:
| It remains a liability forever. You can never make it read-only
| because even 20 years from now someone will be sending your
| legal team take down requests because they don't agree with
| what 9 year old themselves wrote next to their real name...
| peter303 wrote:
| Verizon is winnowing low profit yahoo software.
| 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
| nonbirithm wrote:
| I had only recently thought about this when YouTube announced
| they were hiding the video dislike count. Killing off Yahoo
| Answers is far worse.
|
| 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.
| 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...
| m463 wrote:
| and no groups.
|
| I think my friend uses it for news.
| 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 :-)
| jedberg wrote:
| Alexa is a terrible way to compare traffic on websites.
| Their data is biased towards people who run Windows and
| are willing to run their toolbar.
|
| I know for sure that it has always massively undercounted
| reddit traffic for example but I'll bet it is fairly
| accurate for Yahoo, since "runs Windows and random
| toolbars" is their target audience.
| oblio wrote:
| While I agree with your assessment, some data is better
| than no data.
|
| Plus my main point was that Yahoo is still a huge site.
| Maybe not in our circles, but a lot of people use it.
| 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.
| m463 wrote:
| > Yahoo email for example
|
| The only reason I get yahoo email is because there was a
| vulnerability a few years ago and everyone's account got
| broken into.
| 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
| [deleted]
| 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)?
| henearkr wrote:
| No, it seems like Chiebukuro (the Japanese version of Yahoo
| Answers) is not ending.
|
| At least, on their front page they do not hint at any such
| intention: https://chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/
| SteveGerencser wrote:
| Just think of all those low quality links placed there for SEO
| reasons that are about to vanish.
| languagehacker wrote:
| Yahoo Answers to shut down May 4, 2021?
| bobbydreamer wrote:
| To sad to see Y!A go. Quora used to be great 5yrs back now it's a
| shit. I get notifications of post like "I am earning $250k don't
| know what to do with my life", really. It's just essays of self
| boasting....
|
| 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.
| tzs wrote:
| > Quora used to be great 5yrs back now it's a shit. I get
| notifications of post like "I am earning $250k don't know what
| to do with my life", really. It's just essays of self
| boasting....
|
| 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?
| 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.
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| Maybe this will be helpful:
| https://github.com/buren/wayback_archiver
| 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.
| joshspankit wrote:
| We have 'how is prangent formed', so if we're not getting a
| static copy at least I know the diamond that was created from it
| will continue on forever.
| jebeng wrote:
| I believe it's:
|
| > 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.
| joshspankit wrote:
| I mean sure if we want to go back to the origins, but
| _personally_ I like this one:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EShUeudtaFg
| 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...
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Yeah, that's a classic troll right there. Absolutely none is
| that stupid.
| blackearl wrote:
| My go to - 2 minutes of pregnancy questions
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EShUeudtaFg
| ryan-allen wrote:
| Follow it up with 2 minutes of Ouija board questions!
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15nNY7uofNw
| 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/
| pmiller2 wrote:
| If not, you lose resolution for no reason.
| 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.
| ud_0 wrote:
| With recent content, I prefer to know how many hours/days
| ago it was posted. I find that exponentially more helpful
| than guessing timezones and things like that.
|
| _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.
| Igelau wrote:
| I would prefer Yahoo Answers to have fuzzy timestamps. On a
| site where the information is somewhat reliable it would be
| really annoying, but on Yahoo Answers when you see "decade"
| you know its not even worth opening the lid to smell it.
| Just chuck it.
| canjobear wrote:
| The point of Yahoo Answers isn't to find useful
| information. It's to find hysterically dumb questions and
| even worse answers
| thebigspacefuck wrote:
| Slack does this too and it's pretty annoying if I'm trying
| to figure out the exact time someone messaged me.
|
| It would even take less space:
|
| 4 hours ago
|
| 04:12AM
| 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">
| hnick wrote:
| Revealing it on hover would be the desktop UI answer and
| perfectly achievable on the web if they wanted to.
| Facebook does this on post times. I think it's a decent
| tradeoff.
|
| Unfortunately mobile doesn't always work nicely with
| hover semantics.
| 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.
| m463 wrote:
| I now remember a bunch of text clocks years ago...
|
| "It's about half past two."
|
| "It's a little before quarter to three."
| 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
| Kognito wrote:
| > 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.
| space_fountain wrote:
| For whatever good it does, I did sort of think about the
| fact this was an over generalization, when writing this,
| but it's also absolutely the way I thought about it at
| the time. I do actually remember having a more limited
| but similar feeling visiting a library in I think Bath,
| UK which felt similar in quality to the libraries in
| truly tiny towns growing up in Ohio. It was free, but the
| services offered and number of books was way worse than
| I'd expect from a similarly sized US city especially one
| that seemed sort of well to do. Meanwhile I think a lot
| of people in the US have a mostly fair impression of
| Western European countries investing a lot into their
| public sectors, but for better or worse my very
| scientific impression is that the US invests a lot more
| into libraries.
|
| I didn't mean to imply that all libraries charge in
| Europe though. I knew that wasn't true, I just would have
| assumed before that all libraries in western Europe were
| free
| alephu5 wrote:
| Same thing in Spain, many libraries with no cost
| whatsoever.
| MandieD wrote:
| In my little corner of Germany, the Nurnberg (Nuremberg)
| metro area, the Nurnberg city library (Stadtsbibliothek)
| charges about 10 EUR/year for a library card, and
| Volksbucherei Furth is 18 EUR/yr for adults, with various
| discounts for students and public assistance recipients -
| the latter is a foundation.
|
| But a card for the Erlangen-Nurnberg
| Universitatsbibliothek, and if you're willing to wait for
| delivery, every other academic library in Bavaria, was
| something on the order of 5 EUR, and required absolutely
| no connection with the university other than having an
| address in the area.
| umanwizard wrote:
| European countries are more similar to each other than
| they are to the US, or to most countries in Asia or
| Africa. They're also more similar to each other than the
| US is to any other country in the Americas besides
| Canada. Those reasons are why we sometimes talk about
| them as one cluster, even those of us who know that the
| various countries aren't identical.
| nine_k wrote:
| I'd also say that US states are quite varied in their
| culture. Maybe not as much as European countries, but
| still the comparison between US and Western Europe is not
| between a single hue and a rainbow, but rather between
| different spectra.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Cultural differences do exist in the US, but IMO they
| have little to do with state borders. Someone from
| Brooklyn has much more in common with someone from Jersey
| City than they do with someone from Ithaca. Phoenix feels
| more like Anaheim than it does like Nogales. And so on.
| m463 wrote:
| So netflix is the library model, for movies. :)
| hkt wrote:
| TIL, that's fascinating. I'm a member of a number of
| subscription libraries in the UK that predate public
| libraries and had no idea about Carnegie's role.
|
| 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.
| surround wrote:
| Despite it's infamy, Yahoo Answers was the largest Q&A website
| for a long time and is a huge part of our digital heritage. Soon,
| it will be gone forever. The ArchiveTeam will be doing all they
| can back up as much as possible before it's too late, but IP
| address rate-limiting is a huge roadblock. If you want to help,
| download the ArchiveTeam Warrior and run it in the background. It
| doesn't use a ton of resources - they just need more IP
| addresses.
|
| https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
| moonbug wrote:
| Phew. good to know future generations will still be able to
| find out how babby is made.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| You seem convinced that there is no good content on Yahoo
| Answers..
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| It's like 4chan.
|
| Sometimes there's some good content, but you gotta wade
| through the 99% sewage to see any of it.
| muzani wrote:
| I think 4chan has much higher quality content on average.
| LightG wrote:
| And much higher extremity of content.
|
| Asking better questions is normally a "better" way to
| find higher quality content.
| ai_ja_nai wrote:
| beside the historycal antropological value, and all the
| associated hilarity, there is very little content worth
| saving
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| I have a hard time believing that the value of the content
| exceeds the resource cost of archiving it.
| moonbug wrote:
| even if I hadn't been there to know for myself, Sturgeon's
| Law would seem to be applicable.
| muzani wrote:
| 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.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| And how to find out if u can get...pregante
| [deleted]
| tijuco2 wrote:
| Ok, I have my machine set up, but the project you're asking us
| to help with isn't available.
| sellyme wrote:
| Selected "recommended project", that will default over to
| Yahoo! Answers as soon as the project has been tested enough
| to push to all of the Warriors.
| tijuco2 wrote:
| I think you mean "ArchiveTeam's Choice". So I chose this
| option and it's downloading Reddit stuff, not Yahoo.
| cormorant wrote:
| I'm willing to donate my IP address, but is this active or is
| it still being set up? I downloaded the Warrior but don't see
| Yahoo Answers as an available project.
| ajayyy wrote:
| It is not active yet. If you select "recommended project",
| then it will probably switch when the time comes. For now, it
| is reddit.
|
| Check http://chat.efnet.org:9090/?channels=%23noanswers for
| updates.
| tech234a wrote:
| That was the link for the old project from 2016-2017. In
| 2020, Archive Team switched IRC networks, so the current
| link is https://webirc.hackint.org/#irc://irc.hackint.org/%
| 23noanswe...
| okanesen wrote:
| Minor correction: https://webirc.hackint.org/#irc://irc.h
| ackint.org/noanswers
|
| Without the %23 prefix.
| agumonkey wrote:
| oh interesting, I'll try to contribute too.
| thinkloop wrote:
| > It doesn't use a ton of resources - they just need more IP
| addresses.
|
| 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?
| sellyme wrote:
| > Aren't you also providing 100% of the resources if they are
| using 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Note: ArchiveTeam is not the same people as archive.org,
| however, the results will indeed eventually end up on
| archive.org (since archive.org takes donated WARC data). More
| at
| https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Internet_Archive#Back...
| [deleted]
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| Hold on, who _is_ behind https://archiveteam.org?
|
| Folks, careful what extensions you add.
| sellyme wrote:
| Archive Team is probably one of the most reputable
| organisations on the internet at this point. Being careful
| is great, but when you yourself linked to a page that
| provides an extraordinary amount of information explaining
| exactly who they are and what they're doing (plus the
| source code to prove it!), it comes across as
| fearmongering.
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| Most reputable? I don't think so. Archive.org and EFF are
| far more well known. Also, when I wrote this comment, the
| home page 404'ed for me.
|
| Naming yourself after a well known org and adding "team"
| after it doesn't sit well with me.
| ajayyy wrote:
| The name "archive" isn't reserved for the Internet
| Archive. ArchiveTeam is not an organisation, just a group
| of volunteers.
| sellyme wrote:
| > Naming yourself after a well known org
|
| They're named after the concept of archiving things, as
| the entire point of the group is to archive things.
|
| Archive Team itself is extremely well-known and has been
| the primary force archiving shut-down websites for over a
| decade. The 1TB Geocities archive - possibly the most
| famous website archival project ever - was their work.
| 13rac1 wrote:
| Jason Scott created Archive Team. He works at the
| Internet Archive (archive.org). Archive Team is a
| community project kept distinct from his work.
|
| * https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Who_We_Are
|
| > This project is composed of volunteers, currently
| coordinated by Jason Scott.
|
| * https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/User:Jscott
|
| * https://twitter.com/textfiles
|
| > Proprietor of http://TEXTFILES.COM, historian,
| filmmaker, archivist, storyteller. Works on/for the
| Internet Archive. Rank Amateur.
| textfiles wrote:
| oh no he's onto us boys
| FriendlyNormie wrote:
| Oh nice, you're ridiculing someone who is afraid of your
| sketchy as fuck app and you're making no attempt to
| demonstrate that he's wrong. I definitely trust you now.
| Dumb faggot
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| It isn't an extension, it's a VM image. Unless you believe
| they possess and are publicly distributing an unpatched VM
| breakout the worst it can do is maliciously use your
| internet connection.
| neolog wrote:
| The "who we are" link on that page answers your questions.
| blagie wrote:
| I'm not questioning this particular site, but if you're
| unfamiliar with a project, trusting a "who we are" link
| is just about the worst way to verify it. You're bound to
| be p4wn3d. Anyone can claim to be anyone.
|
| Personally, I'd look for a link from e.g. eff.org, or a
| similar trusted site.
|
| Why should you trust me? I'm Larry Page. Why should you
| trust that I'm Larry Page? Simple. Look at the "Who am I"
| part of this post.
|
| Who am I: Larry Page, obviously.
|
| As a footnote, I'd never run something like this on my
| computer, but if it's just IPs you want, an RPi image
| would get you my IP.
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| Exactly. This "group" is run by one person and an above
| comment claims it's one of the most reputable tech
| organizations. I think not since I've never heard of them
| and I've read tech news daily for the last two decades. I
| can't think of why someone would try to tell a techie
| that a certain unknown tech org is reputable unless they
| were advertising for it.
| vidarh wrote:
| This just suggests to me you've not paid attention to
| news reports around big services shutting down, as
| Archive Team gets brought up regularly in those
| instances.
|
| Nothing wrong with that, and asking the question is fair
| enough, but doubling down on it in the face of being
| given references to who they are that are easy to verify
| gets a bit tiresome.
|
| Especially since this is a group prominent enough to have
| a brief but well cited Wikipedia page [1] with references
| to media appearances in Wired, The Register, PC World,
| Technology Review, OnTheMedia, Techdirt, BBC, RadioNZ,
| CBC, New Scientist and others.
|
| You can also find Jason Scott on HN [2], and his comments
| will point you to a number of other HN threads discussing
| archival, some of which are relevant to Archive Team.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_Team
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=textfiles
| sellyme wrote:
| > I think not since I've never heard of them and I've
| read tech news daily for the last two decades.
|
| That's weird, because they seem to have quite a lot of
| coverage in major tech news sites:
|
| https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/In_The_Media
| pfranz wrote:
| They've been around for over a decade and every time a
| service shuts down and pulls their content there's always
| a mention of ArchiveTeam trying to coordinate an archive
| (negotiating end dates, any limiting or throttling with
| backup, asking for help). I've used them a bunch of times
| over the years when I see a thread like this. Just search
| this forum and you'll see them pop up for things like:
| imdb forums, coursera courses, soundcloud, tumblr's nsfw
| content, friendster, google reader archives.
| neolog wrote:
| I don't think I've ever seen a webpage that claims to be
| owned by someone other than the real owner, aside from
| typosquat phishing sites.
| patd wrote:
| https://help.archive.org/hc/en-
| us/articles/360001513491-Save...
|
| They point to the Archive Team in point 4
| MichaelApproved wrote:
| I'd like to contribute but I'm nervous about allowing random
| content to be downloaded through my connection.
|
| 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?
| sellyme wrote:
| > 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).
| MichaelApproved wrote:
| I just realized this tool is dedicated to specific
| archiving projects, not general site archiving that
| archive.org offers.
|
| I was worried about random websites that get archived on
| archive.org.
| Wingy wrote:
| It's the same as looking at the pages directly in a browser.
| A browser also caches images it sees in most cases.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Is living on knees like that really worth it? Find your
| hacker spirit.
| Jarwain wrote:
| I think that Technically it's possible, If for some reason
| Yahoo Answers had illegal content that was never reported and
| moderated away. I think thats pretty unlikely, though; I'd
| expect yahoo to be pretty on top of moderation if only due to
| liability reasons
|
| 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
| ajayyy wrote:
| If you choose the Yahoo Answers project, it will only be
| downloading stuff from Yahoo Answers
| xnyan wrote:
| If I sent you a link to a yahoo answers page, would you worry
| about the legal repercussions of opening it?
| aerosmile wrote:
| AuntKatie will be disappointed - she wrote 143k answers.
|
| https://answers.yahoo.com/activity/questions?show=sjRwIxRCaa
| [deleted]
| seiferteric wrote:
| Gunna miss those classic Ken M Answers as well
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_M
| mb_72 wrote:
| Ironically, considering the amount of sentiment being
| displayed here, Ken M is quoted as saying "I was appalled by
| the Yahoo comment section. It was such a toxic, shitty
| space." in this interview:
|
| https://redditblog.com/2015/10/03/ken-m-interview-
| internet-t...
| someperson wrote:
| Sounds like he meant Yahoo News' comment section (where he
| got his start) not Yahoo Answers
| PiRho3141 wrote:
| Not only that, but her answers were "in memory of ...[of her
| husband], a gentle spirit, and in memory of my father, mother,
| aunts, uncles, friends, and many others who have lost the
| cancer battle."
|
| Way to hit the feelers.
| echelon wrote:
| This is heartbreaking, especially if you think about all the
| people like her. And your own family.
|
| All of it about to be annihilated...
|
| We're so transient, all that we love, experience, and care
| about. It hurts.
| 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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