#The Q&A Platform Shuts Down May 4th – Review Geek

Like the ancient library of Carthage, Yahoo Answers will be nothing more than a memory when it shuts down May 4th. The great knowledge stored in Yahoo Answers will not be available to future generations who need to cheat on their homework or ask important questions like “am I gregnant?“. It is a dark day for humanity, my friends.

Yahoo Answers launched in 2005 as a Q&A platform, sort of like Quora or some Reddit forums. Many users took it seriously, happily engaging with the Yahoo Answers community and amassing “points” for answering questions. But the website was best known for its idiotic questions, trolls, and math questions. Even now, Yahoo Answers is remembered as a meme, though the website garners very little traffic thanks to modern forums, Q&A platforms, and intelligent search engines.

People who still use Yahoo Answers blame its shutdown on just about everything, especially trolls and anonymous users. In reality, Yahoo Answers is just a relic from the mid-2000s and useless to modern web users, save for trolls. But people love to point the finger over this kind of thing, and in time, users will likely blame Verizon for the shutdown.

Verizon is Yahoo’s parent company and has a long history of mismanaging websites, including Tumblr and Yahoo Mail. Of course, Yahoo made similar moves before falling under Verizon’s umbrella, buying and trashing websites like GeoCities. It doesn’t help that Verizon refuses to provide Yahoo Answers data to archivists, who have less than a month to secure the site’s history.

Yahoo Answers will stop taking questions April 20th and completely shut down on May 4th. Users have until June 30th to request their data from the website. The team at Archive.org is racing to collect data from Yahoo Answers, but you should still request your data to ensure that it isn’t lost for good.

Source: Verizon via The Verge