[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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-04-05 23:00 UTC)