Yahoo Answers will shut down after 16 years
April 7, 2021- Yahoo Answers will be wiped from the Internet on May 4, 2021
- All users will have a chance to save their data until June 30, 2021
- Last questions submissions are only to be accepted until April 20, 2021
After living on the internet for 16 years, Yahoo Answers is finally to bid goodbye to everyone. All questions can only be submitted until April 20th and the entire site will be fully wiped on May 4, 2021.
Despite not gathering too much world knowledge from the said site, a lot of ridiculous memes were born in it. “how is babby formed?”, the pregnant/pragnant/gregnant questions, and “Should I tell my parents I’m adopted?” also came from Yahoo Answers.
Yahoo Answers has been owned by Verizon since 2017. As there is a continuous debate regarding Section 230, legislation that protects platforms like Yahoo and Facebook from being held legally liable for content posted by users, they opted for this decision to save themselves from the headache.
Users, on the other hand, may request for their data until June 30th, 2021, after that, everything will be inaccessible. That includes “all user-generated content including your Questions list, Questions, Answers list, Answers, and any images,” Yahoo says, but “you won’t be able to download other users’ content, questions, or answers.”
Below is a note that was sent to active Yahoo Answers members which gave them a little bit more details as to why they’re shutting down. The note includes “it has become less popular over the years” and that “we have decided to shift our resources away from Yahoo Answers”.
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 war 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 honored 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
This huge decision that Verizon made wasn’t a first of the many services that got shut down in the past, including Yahoo Messenger (2018), Geocities (2009), and Flickr (2018). In addition to that, this may actually be for the best considering the image that it holds where a lot of unreliable answers and unanswered questions can be found.
