After 16 years of operation, the originator of the Q&A website has come to an end.

Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “21Tech” (ID: News-21).

Noon on April 11, Beijing time. According to reports, as one of the oldest question and answer sites on the Internet, Yahoo Q&A will be completely closed on May 4. After that, you will be redirected to the Yahoo homepage when you visit the site. , The website user question and answer data will all be cleared.

This means that the answers to more than 85 million questions contributed by countless people over the past 16 years will disappear completely in the Internet wave following the closure of this website.

Yahoo Answers started operations in 2005. Although it is still full of niche cultures, in the face of the rise of competitors such as Reddit and Quora, its forum attributes have gradually weakened.

Yahoo was acquired by Verizon Media Group for nearly $5 billion in 2017. The company has posted a closure notice and FAQ on the Yahoo Answers homepage, detailing the closure plan.

Starting from April 20th, the platform will no longer accept new questions. Users can request their own data before June 30, after which they will no longer be able to access the information. For example, users can request all the content they have made, including question lists, question content, answer lists, answer content, and pictures, but they cannot download other people’s content, questions, or answers.

Yahoo said in a notice to active users that the reason for the decision to shut down the platform is that the service has “declined in recent years”, so it “decided to transfer resources and focus on developing other services that can better serve users.” product”.

It is worth noting that in the same month that Yahoo Answers was established, the domestic Baidu Know Questions and Answers platform was also launched. The two functions are similar and the positioning is the same. The difference is that Baidu knows that it is currently working well, but Yahoo Answers is going At the end, it is embarrassing.

What does it mean for the veteran to leave the show?

Among many online Q&A sites today, Yahoo! Q&A, which has been in operation for 16 years, has the status of the originator. It uses the same model as Quora, which was founded later, and Zhihu-users ask questions, and then other users answer them. .

In 2005, once Yahoo Q&A was launched, it quickly gained popularity. At its peak, it claimed to have 200 million users and 15 million visits per day. In December 2006, according to comScore statistics, Yahoo announced that Yahoo Answers is the most popular question and answer site on the Internet.

Hirag Shah, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Washington, pointed out that as of 2008, Yahoo Answers was not only the largest online Q&A website, but also the largest website on the entire Internet at that time.

In the blooming Internet, the problems that Yahoo Q&A faces are: more and more basic questions, users can get answers from Google and Wikipedia; and it is difficult to guarantee the authenticity and practicality of the information.

The starting point of the Q&A community is pure and rigorous knowledge sharing, but Yahoo Q&A, which has a large number of users, may be “not rigorous enough” in controlling the rigor of content. Some netizens said: “The number of incidents of medical injuries, waste of money and false information caused by Yahoo Q&A is staggering” and “Yahoo may not be legally liable, but at least it should bear moral responsibility.”

In terms of the quality of the problem, users have become increasingly dissatisfied. Netizen @Fernandolemon: “Someone once asked, ‘What does it mean to dream of a white dog traveling by train and bus?’ This shows that people here are asking what stupid questions.”

We all thought that the Internet has all the answers in the worldBut the brilliance of the problem platform is not only due to the above Q&A.

After research, Shirag Sha pointed out that the reason why people prefer to post to seek help from strangers instead of searching for answers to questions on Google is for the sense of identity and social support. The fact that someone answered your question is more important than the accuracy of the answer itself.

“The most recognized answer is not necessarily the answer with the best content quality, but the answer that resonates most with the questioner.”

As a result, the social attributes of Yahoo Q&A soon surpassed the attributes of knowledge, which also turned it into an absurd playground, full of all kinds of weird questions and unobtrusive answers. Its vitality is not the high enthusiasm of people gathering firewood, but more like a group of drunk adults partying at a carnival.

Q: Is Pokémon real? I just saw a wonderful frog seed but it alsoIt may be a lettuce.

However, starting around 2011, with the rise of Twitter and Instagram, Yahoo Q&A gradually lost its competitiveness.

Yahoo Answers withdrew from the stage of history, an era is over.

In a recent ESQUIRE commemorative article, Justin McElroy, one of the hosts of the podcast, concluded that in three cases, people will turn to Yahoo Q&A for help:

  • When you can’t ask anyone in reality because your question is too strange or embarrassing;

  • When your question is so specific that no one has ever considered it;

  • When you drink too much.

McElroy said, “We came to this world alone and we will leave alone, and between these two points, we seek to connect and identify with others.” But everyone will At that moment, I accidentally broke away from the norms of society. At this time, Yahoo Answers gave an opportunity for people to ask their own questions boldly without being scorned or ridiculed.

Source: Sina Technology, Quanxian APP, CSDN