Yahoo implosion continues - Yahoo Answers closing May 4

[bucolic_frolic]

From their notice: "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."

If they were the *best* place to ask questions and find answers, how come they're closing? I found their answers to be riddled with trolls, stupid ideas. Many other sites have answers, and Google search has just about everything indexed and searchable.

If they were the *best* they would have grown!

I fear the day will come when Yahoo Mail, despite their claims of permanency, will be announced on 3 weeks notice too. That would be a nightmare of an archiving problem for those of us who have used it for decades. And there is no global download solution. With Groups they gave you a run-on text file. Some use that.

The internet keeps consolidating and the Big Fish are winners. The rest - Lycos, MySpace, Excite, Jeeves - have tumbled or gone away.

[jimfields33]

1. A lot of sites have closed down comments.

Too many deranged republicans writing nonsense and worse racist nastiness. Obviously more junk also. We can’t have nice things cuz of them. I always enjoyed the comments especially at first when sites first started.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

3. And bots and spam ... it takes a lot of manpower to moderate forums. If we didn't essentially

moderator DU ourselves as members, I doubt the folks running it would be able to afford paying people to do so.

[jimfields33]

4. Good point. I honestly forgot about bots and spam. That's a very good

point. I’m glad we moderate ourselves. From time to time I lose my brain and type something stupid. I’m called out on it rightfully so.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

2. If they closed yahoo mail I guarantee they'd make a download option available ...

That sort of thing is like a 1 day dev project for a single developer, no way it'd be 'worth' the public outcry if they didn't do it.

[Lucky Luciano]

5. Not a one day thing.

It would take some clever engineering not to crash the system when everyone wants download at once.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

6. Bandwidth is a separate question from the dev project to create the files, which is trivial

coding-wise.

But you're right, you do need to manage the request queue. Might have to have people request it, then send them an email when it's ready in X hours, they then download it from something akin to an FTP site.