Looks like one of the largest online forums is about to shut down. What a shame, we’ll miss all the silly questions people ask there. When Yahoo Answers shuts down on 4th May, then any link that’s supposed to redirect to Yahoo Answers will be redirected instead to the Yahoo! homepage, all of the page’s archives, questions, all of it, will fade away and cease to exist.
Yahoo! sent a note to its active members board the reason why the company has decided to shut down the QnA forum:
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.
Yahoo Answers Team
The letter is pretty long, but in summary, Yahoo Answers is shutting down because it has declined ever since sites like Reddit, Quora and imageboards like 4Chan came into fruition. To that end, and the continuous decline of Yahoo Answers meant that the company is using less resources and time to maintain it, and thus, decided that shutting down is for the best.
Yahoo Answers is known not by its serious questions with serious answers, but rather its weird and sometimes, stupid questions, which soon became a meme. It is a memorable piece of internet history that should deserve mention for people in the next generation.
Oh wait, the question above has not been answered, but we hope that someday, maybe before the shutdown, Eric will find the answer how babby is formed
May the fourth be with you, Yahoo! Answers, you’ll always be memorable
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