The day has finally come that Yahoo is pulling the plug on the internet’s haven for cursed confusion, Yahoo Answers.
The bastion of naughties nostalgia will be taken offline come May 4, and with it, a trove of the world’s most useless questions will vanish into nothingness. This is our generation’s Library of Alexandria fire, and we must mourn it as such.
The closure follows the similar shuttering of GeoCities, as well as the offloading of services like Flickr and Tumblr as Yahoo moves further away from user-generated content.
As one member of a prominent group of online archivists told BuzzFeed News: “We don’t trust anything that Yahoo owns, period.”
In honour of the end of an era, here’s a look back at our favourite questions posed on Yahoo Answers.
First off, some folks were weirdly obsessed with animals. Gross, but also… same.
RIP Yahoo Answers pic.twitter.com/pxiXjhZuzw
— Gators Daily 🐊 (@GatorsDaily) April 7, 2021
where else can we ask the real hard-hitting questions https://t.co/e3V3kBEPq8 pic.twitter.com/EhV5oqN5YP
— chuck 💐 @ mcm cv c-03 (@charlubby) April 6, 2021
Some people just used the platform to troll, to varying success.
Sometimes the trolls asked the questions, sometimes they supplied the answers, and sometimes they did both. Pure chaos.
Devastating that Yahoo is closing down Yahoo answers, since it’s taking down the internet’s Mona Lisa with it. pic.twitter.com/uqlDzQdFqu
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) April 6, 2021
With Yahoo Answers going away, I figured I’d also commemorate with my favorite image from there pic.twitter.com/axDrmb4zwZ
— Retrotype (@Retronnity) April 6, 2021
the greatest philosophers of our time were found on Yahoo Answers pic.twitter.com/S3SIpdcODj
— Neo Donkus (@poondonkus) April 6, 2021
But sometimes the honest questions posted to Yahoo Answers were more cursed than anything a troll could ever come up with.
https://twitter.com/huntichon/status/1379283858827395073
In memoriam of the eventual shutdown of Yahoo answers, I present to you the one Yahoo question that I quote at least twice a week. pic.twitter.com/JITHD9M3Jo
— watching it burn (@tobynook) April 5, 2021
will miss some of these users https://t.co/XTMDY7BQvB pic.twitter.com/jimdv8OdA5
— crustacean (@lobsterlover) April 6, 2021
And who could forget the most iconic genre of question in Yahoo Answers history: How is babby formed?
This is like tearing down the Louvre https://t.co/5M9Gm2oPb2 pic.twitter.com/yzq1gJIxqc
— Snoopy Scoopiano (@GODDOLLARS) April 5, 2021
There’s also a variation of the theme which birthed such glorious misspellings as prengan, gregnant and pregante.
https://twitter.com/FloofRam/status/1379265402547499010
One thing you might notice is that all these iconic Yahoo Answers moments are all about a decade or so old.
Nowadays, the platform has become a shell of its former self. Just take a look at the current trending topics on the front page like “Will America survive 4 years of Joe Biden?”
If you filter out all the questions relating to Yahoo Answers’ imminent shutdown, what you have at the bottom of the swamp is a cesspit of conspiracy theories and hyper-partisan non-questions which, in many cases, can’t even be answered anyway.
So yes, Yahoo Answers has aged well past its use-by date as an SEO goldmine with a sometimes-useful Q&A functionality. But it will remain in our hearts as a medium through which all the internet’s madness was channeled into brief glimmers of glory.
Farewell Yahoo Answers, we hardly knew ye.
