Yahoo Answers, a community-driven Q&A website will be shut down effective from May 4, 2021. Yahoo Answers was release in 2005 to cover discussions on a variety of topics including news, health, education, and entertainment. The portal gradually evolved to accommodate questions and answers related to politics.
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Why did Yahoo decide to shut down Yahoo Answers?
The platform was created with an intention to cover diverse topics. However, politics seemed to dominate other aspects. As a result, the platform began to be used as a tool to give fuel to far-right conspiracy hypotheses. Recent events like the US elections were also taken advantage of to spread miscommunication.
Earlier, Yahoo Answers used to consist of thought-provoking explanations on science, literature, and political science. In the later stage, it turned into an accumulation of trivial objective questions like “Will America survive 4 years of Joe Biden?” and “Was Stalin right about everything?”
Yahoo sent a note to the existing Yahoo Answers users giving the details about the shutdown of the service. The note reads as follows.
Dear Yahoo Answers Community,
We launched Yahoo Answers sixteen years ago to help people around the world connect and share information. With you and millions of other users, we built the best place on the web to ask and answer questions on a variety of topics, creating a community of global knowledge sharing. While we could not have been prouder of what we accomplished together, we are reaching out today to let you know that we have decided to shut down Yahoo Answers on May 4th, 2021.
While Yahoo Answers was once a key part of Yahoo’s products and services, it has become less popular over the years as the needs of our members have changed. To that end, we have decided to shift our resources away from Yahoo Answers to focus on products that better serve our members and deliver on Yahoo’s promise of providing premium trusted content.
Starting on April 20th you will no longer be able to post any new questions or answers. However, you can still view any posted questions and answers until May 4th. On May 4th the site will be shutting down. If you would like to download a copy of your questions and answers you have posted, you can do this by signing into Your Privacy Dashboard and requesting a download. You will be able to do this until June 30th, 2021 after which your Yahoo Answers data will be securely deleted and no longer available. The closure of Yahoo Answers will not affect your Yahoo account or other Yahoo services. For further information and instructions on how to download your data, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions or copy and paste this URL into your browser: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN35642.html
Thank you for contributing to Yahoo Answers — we’re proud and honoured to have helped you connect with and learn from the Yahoo community these past sixteen years. If you’d like to provide feedback, please feel free to reach out to our team at [email protected].
Sincerely, The Yahoo Answers team
Yahoo has set a deadline of June 30, 2021, for users to get the data associate with their questions and answers. After the deadline, the entire data will be deleted permanently with no provision for the user to recover it.
How will the shutdown of yahoo Answers impact other platforms?
Yahoo Answers has been serving as a platform for several users to feed their curiosity for the past fifteen years. The shutdown of the website will induce its users to shift to other Q&A platforms like Quora and Reddit.
Websites like Yahoo Answers, Quora, and Reddit are all the same in their basic forms. All of them just provide a stage for people to carry out discussions. Shutting down a website may not appear justified to some people. Instead, bringing strict policies for posting comments and using Artificial Intelligence to filter out offensive posts can be taken as a long-term solution.
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