It's the end of the information superhighway for Yahoo Answers, the Q&A site that was once amazingly popular and reliably packed with hilarious nonsense. It rotted under years of indifference and is now a blandly corporate whitewall with a moderation problem, same as all the others. They're shutting it down, and a look at the propaganda-infested homepage offers fair reason why.
Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th, 2021 (Eastern Time) and beginning April 20th, 2021 (Eastern Time) the Yahoo Answers website will be in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.
An irony is that Yahoo Answers effectively functioned as a relatively safe place for girls and young women on the net—until it didn't. Here's a longer note sent to users (via The Verge):
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 yahoo_answers_sunset@verizonmedia.com.
Sincerely, The Yahoo Answers team
Truley sorry for our lots.
