My main experience with Yahoo! Answers is that it's more of a trolling platform than anything else. The questions are trolls, and the answers are trolls.
Nevertheless, I'm going to miss it. The trolling was fun to read, at least.
Do you have any recommendations on how to find more content in this genre (dysfunctional humor / best of dumbest internet content)? It's hard to come up with search terms that would lead me to find this kind of video.
That is worrisome. If I get my wife's baby's baby pregnant (please read the linked post before commenting!), in the case that the little one needs a C-section, will that harm her mother, grandma, or my wife?
YA has little value in providing actual answers, but it's a great source of entertainment and possibly even illumination into how a certain subset of the population think.
Yahoo Japan was a JV between Yahoo and SoftBank. It’s pretty much a huge if not the biggest platform in Japan because of this. Yahoo Japan is not the same as yahoo globally.
Japan it's basically it's own little world. Their local version of Yahoo is not only still very popular, but it looks like it's stuck in the early '00s for some inexplicable reason.
Because most people accessed the internet on their clamshell phones and not through a PC/laptop. So most websites were designed to be mostly text and easily browsed from clamshell-phone internet browsers. Now that smartphones have become ubiquitous more sites are finally being designed to look nice on smartphones - sometimes still at the consequence of desktop use. It took a few years after the iPhone release (aka: for it to get widespread market adoption) for JP websites to start "catching up" with Western web design.
There are some other reasons too - but I'd wager the above is the #1 reason and others are more of an "in addition to that" type thing.
Yahoo! JAPAN is most familiar website brand for older people, but not very well for younger people. Maybe they use apps like Twitter, Instagram, and LINE rather than websites. I think that's why their design isn't refined.
It's not Japan's web design that confuses me, it's the rest of the world. Since the late '00s it seems like removing half of your content and replacing it with larger fonts, huge margins and just blank space became the cool thing to do.
Someone somewhere said of content "let it breathe" and that got repeated until breathing content became a cargo cult. That cargo cult summoned the demons of flat design. They brought with them Metro, Material Design, Bootstrap 3, and iOS 7.
Content started breathing heavily, fonts got almost too skinny to read, and it's almost impossible to tell if text a button.
Makes sense to me. It looks cleaner, it's easier to read, and it's less confusing. If you have a ton of things, it gets confusing and overwhelming. Keep it simple. And stop with the tiny text damn it, there is no reason for it to be tiny. cough hackernews cough
Japan gets a rep for being technologically forward thinking, but given their heavy use of faxes and paper records in banking and government, they seem to have shown they are very slow to move forward in broad ways.
Is that the experience of someone who actively used it for a period of time or of someone who just heard of it offhandedly. The latter would clearly only hear of the memes and trolling, since those bubble out much more than helpful answers.
Why sarcasm? Yahoo Answers represents an important slice of online culture from the early 2000s. Are our kids supposed to just believe us when we tell them how babby is formed[1]?
Yahoo Answers served as a social network for kids shortly after chatroom culture died. It was particularly the home of underrepresented and oppressed groups, like LGBT youth and minority religions. I spent time there as a teenager and saw a huge number of people ask about things and talk about things they couldn't in real life. Gay kids trying to figure out their place. Muslim kids questioning things they'd been taught. Terrified kids going through a pregnancy scare looking for guidance and reassurance.
That it became an alt-right cesspit is a terrible shame. It was a silly place but it deserves a better place in internet history than that.
Why is Yahoo even still around? They got rid of search. They got rid of the directory. They sold Alibaba. What are they still doing, if anything?
Verizon may be getting out of content. With antitrust regulation picking up, it's quite likely that telcos will be required to get out of the content business. Historically, the US made movie companies stop owning movie theaters, and car companies stop owning dealers. Although Yahoo is now such a loser that it's hard to make an antitrust case against Verizon owning them. AT&T and DirectTV, though...
I got my Yahoo Mail address in 1996 because teenage me thought my address @yahoo.com would be so cool. Nowadays I use it just for online shops, etc (I also use it for Facebook, which is a bad idea, because online shops upload their customer info to Facebook and, tada, guess whose profile matches for targetted advertising). Today I logged in and a stupid ad popped up (I wish I can remember what it was for). When I do a password reset on one of these shops, Yahoo also recognizes those kinds of emails and recommends LastPass or whatever password service they bought.
Incidentally, they've also lost all my mail from before year 2001, when I actually use them for personal communications, meaning all those emails are now lost (well maybe I have a backup somewhere...). What a fucking useless company.
I helped a person get back into their yahoo mail account and the web interface showed auto playing video ads with sound. I recommended they get a different account or at least use IMAP to check mail, but they were not interested.
There are actually many quality yahoo products, not yahoo sports and yahoo finance are very widely used. Yahoo finance is a mini Bloomberg terminal at this point.
This would be my gut reaction, but for whatever it’s worth, and however they create this metric: Alexa says they’re #11 in “global internet engagement”.
Yahoo still makes billions in revenue every year. And the vast majority is not from finance or sports.
Baffling to some HN readers perhaps, but Yahoo is still one of the biggest online destinations. It has a DAU count an order of magnitude larger than say Reddit, and it monetizes those users far more effectively.
I would say that Reddit, despite its popularity, is notoriously mismanaged, so it's actually quite an appropriate comparison. Reddit is just culturally more relevant :-)
Alexa is a terrible way to compare traffic on websites. Their data is biased towards people who run Windows and are willing to run their toolbar.
I know for sure that it has always massively undercounted reddit traffic for example but I'll bet it is fairly accurate for Yahoo, since "runs Windows and random toolbars" is their target audience.
Yahoo as a brand is probably still worth something. Its a grand father from dotcom bubble that people still recognized. Yahoo still provided a lot of services that people use like Yahoo email for example.
Verizon, as part of their ownership of Yahoo and AOL, controls a significant proportion of email inboxes. There is quite a lot of strategic value in that. They've been particularly bad, from my perspective, in terms of allowing our emails to get through, but I shudder at the thought of email being under 90% control by Google.
Though I'm not a user and never liked the service myself, I'd like it to be preserved. It is part of internet history. Let's not let happen to answers what happened to geocities.
No, voting down your comment does not mean it is correct. It means the voters (vote downers) disagree with it and are expressing that. You must not be smart enough to get that. But anyhow.
Oof, What a mess it would be to have to dredge through terrabytes of online forum posts, tweets, and other nonsense.
But your point stands, looked at as a whole, and with data mining, I guess they could gather something about common words uses, time spent on the internet etc...
But I wonder who would really care about the flame wars, and chit chat 200 years from now.
We are still having a good laugh at Ea-Nasir's[0] expense nearly 40 centuries later. I say we should keep these writings, especially as text is very lightweight to store.
Unfortunately Verizon has shown itself to be unwilling to work with Internet Archive and others that want to preserve this history. When Yahoo Groups shut down couple years ago, Verizon made no effort to help the archival and actually banned accounts that were attempting to scrape data.
Yahoo answers is the reason I was insecure about not having an average 8 inch penis when I was 11 years old. It was probably the lowest quality forum that I’ve ever seen and I’m glad to hear it’s shutting down.
The answers idea has been tried by many and it’s the quality of the answers that matters most, but this is presumably out of the developers control. If you have yahoo answers, quora, metafilter, askReddit, and stackoverflow, the primary differences in my mind are the website cultures. Quora has apparently developed a very pro CCP slant lately, not something the developers intended (one hopes.) it also seems to be den of self promotion. Stackoverflow is genuinely useful for experts, but has many memes about the type of answers one can expect to a beginner question. Ask Reddit is not a place that you can expect to get an answer if it’s not interesting enough to gain upvotes or be made fun of. Yahoo answers tried to provide a simple Q&A format, but both the quality of questions and answers were unsatisfying (how is baby formed).
They've only been doing one or even no Yahoo questions per episode for a while now. I almost suspect this will relieve them and give then an "out" to pivot to different formats.
In any case I think I agree as Yahoo answers just became a site riddled with bots spamming link shorteners laden with ads. Twas good while it lasted though
Public libraries aren't a thing in many countries. The reason North America has a tradition of public libraries is that one of the richest men of the 20th century decided to leave behind a legacy of literacy [1]. Prior to that, quite a few protestant groups were big on literacy and invented the idea of public libraries for all.
I have friends from other countries who have told me that libraries in their home countries are indeed commercial, you pay a small fee to rent a book for a fixed period of time. Stories from childhood, so I am not sure if such libraries are still common place in those countries, but the question is most certainly not stupid.
For one example of this currently, here's what comes up when I search for Amsterdam Public library: https://www.oba.nl/service/word-lid.html (it also matches my memory of walking around the big public library in Amsterdam).
That's $44 a year to checkout up to 50 items (only 6 ebooks) and $1 for every reservation you want to make. For $56 bucks you get unlimited checkout. Its not exactly a huge cost, but still not what I expected based on my experience in the US and my perception of Europe
> not what I expected based on my experience in the US and my perception of Europe
I'm always fascinated to see comparisons between the US and Europe (as a European myself), as if the comparison were between two countries, rather than a country and a continent consisting of many, very different countries. You'll find some commonality between neighbouring European countries, but not in the same way you would between US states.
Speaking from experience, the UK & Ireland have an extensive system of public libraries, usually each local area will have one, where books and materials can be checked out for free.
Similarly my experience in France was the same, materials can be checked out for free.
For whatever good it does, I did sort of think about the fact this was an over generalization, when writing this, but it's also absolutely the way I thought about it at the time. I do actually remember having a more limited but similar feeling visiting a library in I think Bath, UK which felt similar in quality to the libraries in truly tiny towns growing up in Ohio. It was free, but the services offered and number of books was way worse than I'd expect from a similarly sized US city especially one that seemed sort of well to do. Meanwhile I think a lot of people in the US have a mostly fair impression of Western European countries investing a lot into their public sectors, but for better or worse my very scientific impression is that the US invests a lot more into libraries.
I didn't mean to imply that all libraries charge in Europe though. I knew that wasn't true, I just would have assumed before that all libraries in western Europe were free
European countries are more similar to each other than they are to the US, or to most countries in Asia or Africa. They’re also more similar to each other than the US is to any other country in the Americas besides Canada. Those reasons are why we sometimes talk about them as one cluster, even those of us who know that the various countries aren’t identical.
I'd also say that US states are quite varied in their culture. Maybe not as much as European countries, but still the comparison between US and Western Europe is not between a single hue and a rainbow, but rather between different spectra.
Cultural differences do exist in the US, but IMO they have little to do with state borders. Someone from Brooklyn has much more in common with someone from Jersey City than they do with someone from Ithaca. Phoenix feels more like Anaheim than it does like Nogales. And so on.
In my little corner of Germany, the Nürnberg (Nuremberg) metro area, the Nürnberg city library (Stadtsbibliothek) charges about 10 EUR/year for a library card, and Volksbücherei Fürth is 18 EUR/yr for adults, with various discounts for students and public assistance recipients - the latter is a foundation.
But a card for the Erlangen-Nürnberg Universitätsbibliothek, and if you're willing to wait for delivery, every other academic library in Bavaria, was something on the order of 5 EUR, and required absolutely no connection with the university other than having an address in the area.
The cheaper price used to give unlimited loans until last year or so, and it's still free with unlimited loans if you're under 19 or have a low income (look under Stadspas). But yeah. Arrangements may differ somewhat by city/village.
TIL, that's fascinating. I'm a member of a number of subscription libraries in the UK that predate public libraries and had no idea about Carnegie's role.
The role for subscription based libraries in the UK is usually for specialist nonacademic research, or perhaps just an old community of readers who like things just-so.
Back in the 19th century one of the things mutuals and co-ops used to do in the UK was provide reading rooms, circulating libraries, lectures and such, much like Carnegie's libraries. It was often working class self help rather than liberal philanthropy, too. There's a great history of this (and lots more) in Jonathan Rose's Intellectual History of the British Working Class.
There are also many places with much more expansive libraries. Like the flagship in Helsinki (yes its funny to have a flagship library) https://www.oodihelsinki.fi/en/
Ugh, I haaaaaaaaaate this habit of masking real timestamps and making them progressively worse.
It _completely_ changes the meaning, if someone asked a question about airplanes on September 10th, 2001 or one day later. Just saying "two decades ago" with no way to reveal the original timestamp removes that context.
It's just one of a whole lot of ways the modern web goes out of its way to get in my way.
Many sites also put it in the title text (tooltip, i.e., hover / long press). When that fails, I often find it by inspecting the element and looking at every attribute of the elements within 1 level on the tree. Horrible experience.
Revealing it on hover would be the desktop UI answer and perfectly achievable on the web if they wanted to. Facebook does this on post times. I think it's a decent tradeoff.
Unfortunately mobile doesn't always work nicely with hover semantics.
I would prefer Yahoo Answers to have fuzzy timestamps. On a site where the information is somewhat reliable it would be really annoying, but on Yahoo Answers when you see "decade" you know its not even worth opening the lid to smell it. Just chuck it.
With recent content, I prefer to know how many hours/days ago it was posted. I find that exponentially more helpful than guessing timezones and things like that.
However, you're completely right when it comes to timestamps exceeding a certain age. That's why in my own projects I use a mixed approach: display recently changed things in relative time and all others in absolute terms.
I also advocate to display more detailed information when the user mouses over a timestamp, just so the data is there if needed - as it is in this case.
Yahoo gets rid of some of their best services. Yahoo Geolocation Service, besides Google which was license restricted, was the most accurate service for putting in an address and getting latitude/longitude coordinates. But they sadly shut it down.
I sure hope they don't shut down Yahoo Finance. It's the best thing that Yahoo currently has.
my stocks widget says that it's switching off finance (probably API?) next update because it's being discontinued. I have not validated that. I mostly use alpha vantage for my own projects now since finance (API) was down for a while.
The upside of the question is it was an example for StackOverflow...a negative example of course. Spolsky talks about it all the time in the early StackOverflow podcasts.
The mismanagement of yahoo/oath/Verizon assets has been stunning. What a waste. Marissa Meyer started it. Her exit and the Verizon acquisition accelerated it. Now they are a husk of early web properties when they could have been an Amazon with the right leadership.
His Yahoo departure is attributed to thyroid cancer: "In 2012, Thompson was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, which was said to be a reason for leaving Yahoo!."
And Marissa Mayer became extremely wealthy for her mishandling of Yahoo.
I don't really understand the argument here. How is sunsetting Answers related to mismanagement?
Seems like Answers, as cool and interesting and funny as it was, was probably not a major revenue driver or even loss leader anymore for Yahoo. Seems like it'd be an obvious candidate for being cut, as a deadweight project that siphons engineering time from initiatives that actually make money.
Sure, it's sad that it's going away. But Yahoo isn't a charity, it's a corporation, and "jettison projects that cost money and focus instead on projects that make money" seems like one of the most basic tenets of managing a business.
Like, I totally get the argument that when Yahoo or Google or whoever shuts down one of their services it's an annoyance for users. No doubt. But I don't understand how it's a sign of "mismanagement".
> How is sunsetting Answers related to mismanagement?
Considering that oath is an ad company and Answers is among the top results for many Google searches and most of the Answer traffic probably is read only this is weird.
Answers users give an intent what they are up to, which allows targeting ads based on that topic. Having mostly readily traffic means that infrastructure can be efficient ...
So yeah, manageqment didn't handle the position well.
Do ads care about targeting these days? I thought they were more interested in retargeting, where they know who you are and always show the most valuable thing on every site, ignoring what you're actually doing at the moment. This is bad for ad displayers because it means there's no point in collecting a higher value audience.
I don’t understand what Yahoo is supposed to be. Suddenly in 2015, they have the genius step of publishing an email UI on paar with Gmail, as they should have done about 10 years earlier. But unless you are using their email, what _is_ Yahoo? For me it is a weather widget and a news feed. Not counting Yahoo Finance because other comments say it’s shutting down. So what is the core business of Yahoo? A news corp that repeats Reuters, but without the TV front-end that CNN has, and without the journalists that the Washington Post has?
I can't answer that for today. But there was a time when they had a very active shopping site -- they were an earlier version of Amazon for 3rd-party merchants, Shopify or Etsy where anyone could open a "store". And Yahoo handled payments, as I recall, just like Amazon does now. I bought many things from there.
Where is that today? Gone, I guess. But it could have been an Amazon or Shopify.
They also had a lucrative ad business. Gone now, I think.
I don't know what they're trying to be, but outside of Yahoo Finance the only other thing I'm aware of people using Yahoo for these days is fantasy sports. One of the fantasy football leagues I do every year still uses Yahoo, and other friends that play fantasy seem to report similar. But I don't know what the numbers actually are because it's true Yahoo doesn't seem to lean into that role much.
How about a new venture? Like building an alternative to the Apple App Store and Google Play? Then going to Congress to complain about default installation on the devices (or any sort of installation at all).
They have the name recognition to pull off something like this.
They were originally a do-everything Internet company like Google, but without the aura of smugness and infinite amount of ad money. (My friend who was a Yahoo Search sysadmin tells me they had nearly as good results as Google on much, much smaller amounts of hardware expenditure.)
At some point they tried to become a media company or something and did hire a lot of journalists, but they kept making the wrong moves and trying to acquire users by buying unprofitable websites like Tumblr and eventually ran out of money.
Meyer didn't start it, but she did put distinctly more marketing and hype into her role than predecessors which shone a brighter spotlight on the already ensuing downfall. I'd be more inclined to pinpoint the start of it to sometime around Jerry Yang's departure and the revolving door of CEOs between him and Mayer when their tenure was more akin to flailing than building leadership.
I do think it's interesting that we call the Web the "repository of human knowledge" when clearly everything is temporary, and you'd do better to buy a book on most subjects.
(Not that I am complaining about it, I just think we should disabuse ourselves of this notion.)
Finally! Although search engines have finally deranked Yahoo Answers, I still resent it for all the years when I would look up something and the top results always included a Yahoo Answer written by a 12 year old. It's pretty much a warehouse of misinformation to such a degree that it makes Quora look like Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of credibility.
People joke like "ha-ha, let it burn!" but it's the ordinary folks and their creations that anthropologists desire most. Ancient graffiti in Rome tells you more about ancient Rome than privileged writings of the era.
Yahoo Answers matters more to culture than any New York Times trend piece.
I wonder if in another 400 years some distant society will look at ours as the "Dark Ages" since all information is locked behind services that have since disappeared like Yahoo Answers, Geocities, AIM profiles, MySpace, and (maybe) Facebook.
Tons. There still exists some holdouts with long histories (such as anandtech). That said, once upon a time nearly all "social media" was forums for things of interest.
It sort of makes me sad for the internet bygone. I really miss the fact that nearly every product had a half dozen fan pages dedicated to it. Things like https://www.massassi.net/ were amazing back in their hayday. Now everything it consolidated into big social media locations :(
If social networks hadn't instituted real-name policies, people wouldn't be so concerned about old comments, because those comments might be linked to pseudonyms, not their real names.
Unlikely. Far more (printed) books are being published today than at any previous time in human history - certainly more so than in the Dark Ages where most had neither the equipment nor the education to write.
And that’s before you include the likes of Wikipedia, which it’s inconceivable won’t be recorded in at least some form. We will have a pretty good record of our civilization to work with - down to the minutest cultural ephemera.
Phrases like "the algorithm" have started showing up in all kinds of videos and texts, not just in tech-centric ones. They had to, now that said algorithm is tied to the ability of certain people to make money and survive. The effect that Big Tech has on our lives and on human history is becoming more and more profound.
> Ancient graffiti in Rome tells you more about ancient Rome than privileged writings of the era.
This just isn't true, for the simplest possible reason: there's more preserved literature than there is preserved graffiti. It also isn't true for the slightly less simple reason that the literature covers a much wider range of topics.
What historians desire most is driven by what they don't have now. Cuneiform tablets are so numerous that they mostly just sit around untranslated. Would they be informative if we did translate them? Of course, but the manpower isn't there. Identical documents from 3rd-century Germany would be an epic, multiple-career-making find. Those would be translated immediately.
We value things the same way. Yahoo Answers is worthless to us because we have infinite amounts of similar material, so there's no cost to destroying this subset of it.
You could try to argue that Yahoo Answers has great future value, and we should therefore preserve it, but if we followed that advice, Yahoo Answers would have no future value, because so much content like it would have been preserved. This approach fails to be logically coherent.
They're both valuable. In linguistics for instance graffiti can tell you things about the language and its evolution that the formal language won't communicate, like how certain letters stop being pronounced or become pronounced differently. Or how some grammatical constructions shift for instance.
Of course they're both valuable. But you cannot reasonably contend that the graffiti is more valuable; it is much less valuable.
> In linguistics for instance graffiti can tell you things about the language and its evolution that the formal language won't communicate, like how certain letters stop being pronounced or become pronounced differently.
This certainly doesn't apply to Latin, which survives today as several robust living languages. We can easily determine how the sounds of Latin changed without making reference to graffiti.
(And of course, the formal literature has quite a bit to say on the sounds of the language, too.)
One reason Pompeii graffiti is valuable, is that it provides some absolute dating of Vulgar Latin features, while the modern Romance languages show only the final outcome without those exact dates.
I think you underestimate just how grateful historical linguists are for popular texts beyond literary ones. Another example is the Novgorod birchbark letters, which not only shed light on old Russian but some of their features (found in no other source) required scholars to completely revise their reconstruction of Slavic historical phonology in general.
I'm not sure that statement is true.
Given just one OR the other, which would you pick? Graffiti, or random chatter/expression by extension, is useful as an addition to privileged writing which serves as a backbone to the events of history. Without the latter, the former isn't nearly as interesting.
Take Native American culture for example. If we could, we would prefer actual historical events written down than just stories that's pass down through word of mouth.
Spam bots are one half of the decades-long battle between people looking for a quick buck and people trying to communicate. It's a huge part of the story of the last few decades of technology. It's right up there with the push and pull of progress of weapons and armor technology. How could that not be valuable?
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 338 ms ] threadMy proving ground was the religious answers group, where I went head to head with the dominant anti-faith trolls.
Nevertheless, I'm going to miss it. The trolling was fun to read, at least.
Do you have any recommendations on how to find more content in this genre (dysfunctional humor / best of dumbest internet content)? It's hard to come up with search terms that would lead me to find this kind of video.
Like the hunter2 one: http://bash.org/?244321
And then people also post stuff in the same vein: https://www.reddit.com/r/NotKenM/
Best question I'm aware of on Yahoo Answers. And the infinite loop response is the best answer.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-is-babby-formed
YA has little value in providing actual answers, but it's a great source of entertainment and possibly even illumination into how a certain subset of the population think.
There are some other reasons too - but I'd wager the above is the #1 reason and others are more of an "in addition to that" type thing.
More info: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-differe...
Content started breathing heavily, fonts got almost too skinny to read, and it's almost impossible to tell if text a button.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26703203
[1] https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080211063124A...
That it became an alt-right cesspit is a terrible shame. It was a silly place but it deserves a better place in internet history than that.
It comes done to how whell you parend the chiyelld. Good parendets explain to the chyelld how babby is achivet.
Verizon may be getting out of content. With antitrust regulation picking up, it's quite likely that telcos will be required to get out of the content business. Historically, the US made movie companies stop owning movie theaters, and car companies stop owning dealers. Although Yahoo is now such a loser that it's hard to make an antitrust case against Verizon owning them. AT&T and DirectTV, though...
Incidentally, they've also lost all my mail from before year 2001, when I actually use them for personal communications, meaning all those emails are now lost (well maybe I have a backup somewhere...). What a fucking useless company.
It seems like if you haven't used it in 12 months they just delete all your old emails. No warning whatsoever.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com
(Again, whatever that means.)
But I think they have a few valuable properties. Sports. Finance. And for whatever reason, the old folks in my family love their Yahoo Weather app.
Baffling to some HN readers perhaps, but Yahoo is still one of the biggest online destinations. It has a DAU count an order of magnitude larger than say Reddit, and it monetizes those users far more effectively.
Yahoo.com, rank 12, Reddit.com, rank 19.
I would say that Reddit, despite its popularity, is notoriously mismanaged, so it's actually quite an appropriate comparison. Reddit is just culturally more relevant :-)
That's what an MBA would say.
I know for sure that it has always massively undercounted reddit traffic for example but I'll bet it is fairly accurate for Yahoo, since "runs Windows and random toolbars" is their target audience.
Plus my main point was that Yahoo is still a huge site. Maybe not in our circles, but a lot of people use it.
Citation needed.
The only reason I get yahoo email is because there was a vulnerability a few years ago and everyone's account got broken into.
I think my friend uses it for news.
I must not be smart enough to get what you’re trying to say.
Yahoo answers is a hot pile of garbage. The Library of Babel has a higher signal to noise ratio.
Let's be respectful to each other. We're here to discuss and not to offend.
But your point stands, looked at as a whole, and with data mining, I guess they could gather something about common words uses, time spent on the internet etc...
But I wonder who would really care about the flame wars, and chit chat 200 years from now.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2018/05/11/me...
https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/yahoo-groups-is-ending-...
Source:
Dude just trust me
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090226170437A...
I have friends from other countries who have told me that libraries in their home countries are indeed commercial, you pay a small fee to rent a book for a fixed period of time. Stories from childhood, so I am not sure if such libraries are still common place in those countries, but the question is most certainly not stupid.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_libraries_in_North_Amer...
That's $44 a year to checkout up to 50 items (only 6 ebooks) and $1 for every reservation you want to make. For $56 bucks you get unlimited checkout. Its not exactly a huge cost, but still not what I expected based on my experience in the US and my perception of Europe
I'm always fascinated to see comparisons between the US and Europe (as a European myself), as if the comparison were between two countries, rather than a country and a continent consisting of many, very different countries. You'll find some commonality between neighbouring European countries, but not in the same way you would between US states.
Speaking from experience, the UK & Ireland have an extensive system of public libraries, usually each local area will have one, where books and materials can be checked out for free.
Similarly my experience in France was the same, materials can be checked out for free.
Can't speak for any other European countries.
I didn't mean to imply that all libraries charge in Europe though. I knew that wasn't true, I just would have assumed before that all libraries in western Europe were free
But a card for the Erlangen-Nürnberg Universitätsbibliothek, and if you're willing to wait for delivery, every other academic library in Bavaria, was something on the order of 5 EUR, and required absolutely no connection with the university other than having an address in the area.
The role for subscription based libraries in the UK is usually for specialist nonacademic research, or perhaps just an old community of readers who like things just-so.
Back in the 19th century one of the things mutuals and co-ops used to do in the UK was provide reading rooms, circulating libraries, lectures and such, much like Carnegie's libraries. It was often working class self help rather than liberal philanthropy, too. There's a great history of this (and lots more) in Jonathan Rose's Intellectual History of the British Working Class.
It _completely_ changes the meaning, if someone asked a question about airplanes on September 10th, 2001 or one day later. Just saying "two decades ago" with no way to reveal the original timestamp removes that context.
It's just one of a whole lot of ways the modern web goes out of its way to get in my way.
<meta property="og:question:published_time" content="2009-02-26T17:04:37Z">
Unfortunately mobile doesn't always work nicely with hover semantics.
"It's about half past two."
"It's a little before quarter to three."
However, you're completely right when it comes to timestamps exceeding a certain age. That's why in my own projects I use a mixed approach: display recently changed things in relative time and all others in absolute terms.
I also advocate to display more detailed information when the user mouses over a timestamp, just so the data is there if needed - as it is in this case.
It would even take less space:
4 hours ago
04:12AM
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/how-i...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EShUeudtaFg
I sure hope they don't shut down Yahoo Finance. It's the best thing that Yahoo currently has.
This was not one of them.
It never attracted high quality Q&A, and was a joke from day one.
Still makes me laugh
Remember when Yahoo hired a CEO who lied about having a CS degree?
https://money.cnn.com/2012/05/13/technology/yahoo-ceo-out/in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Thompson_(businessman)
His Yahoo departure is attributed to thyroid cancer: "In 2012, Thompson was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, which was said to be a reason for leaving Yahoo!."
And Marissa Mayer became extremely wealthy for her mishandling of Yahoo.
Seems like Answers, as cool and interesting and funny as it was, was probably not a major revenue driver or even loss leader anymore for Yahoo. Seems like it'd be an obvious candidate for being cut, as a deadweight project that siphons engineering time from initiatives that actually make money.
Sure, it's sad that it's going away. But Yahoo isn't a charity, it's a corporation, and "jettison projects that cost money and focus instead on projects that make money" seems like one of the most basic tenets of managing a business.
Like, I totally get the argument that when Yahoo or Google or whoever shuts down one of their services it's an annoyance for users. No doubt. But I don't understand how it's a sign of "mismanagement".
My post was a general statement and not directed at any singular Yahoo product.
Considering that oath is an ad company and Answers is among the top results for many Google searches and most of the Answer traffic probably is read only this is weird.
Answers users give an intent what they are up to, which allows targeting ads based on that topic. Having mostly readily traffic means that infrastructure can be efficient ...
So yeah, manageqment didn't handle the position well.
Where is that today? Gone, I guess. But it could have been an Amazon or Shopify.
They also had a lucrative ad business. Gone now, I think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb
They have the name recognition to pull off something like this.
The corporate equivalent of a terminal cancer patient.
What it was, is aptly described here: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2848
At some point they tried to become a media company or something and did hire a lot of journalists, but they kept making the wrong moves and trying to acquire users by buying unprofitable websites like Tumblr and eventually ran out of money.
A few years later they acquired LinkedIn for around that much, and that's definitely been more successful than most of what Yahoo offers now.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-idUSWNAS8942200...
There are 400 (!!!) "partners" listed just for personalized ads!
(Not that I am complaining about it, I just think we should disabuse ourselves of this notion.)
They run a popular service for free for years and then shut it down because they don’t make any money.
Reminds me of the famous(ish) meme that came from Yahoo Answers: https://youtu.be/Ll-lia-FEIY
Have you looked recently? Quora is mostly online marketers. Only marginally better than 12yr olds.
for example: https://www.theonion.com/ask-a-navy-seal-1819583375
or a more pertinent one:
https://www.theonion.com/ask-a-high-school-student-who-didnt...
Yahoo Answers matters more to culture than any New York Times trend piece.
It sort of makes me sad for the internet bygone. I really miss the fact that nearly every product had a half dozen fan pages dedicated to it. Things like https://www.massassi.net/ were amazing back in their hayday. Now everything it consolidated into big social media locations :(
And that’s before you include the likes of Wikipedia, which it’s inconceivable won’t be recorded in at least some form. We will have a pretty good record of our civilization to work with - down to the minutest cultural ephemera.
https://ourworldindata.org/books
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26654258
Phrases like "the algorithm" have started showing up in all kinds of videos and texts, not just in tech-centric ones. They had to, now that said algorithm is tied to the ability of certain people to make money and survive. The effect that Big Tech has on our lives and on human history is becoming more and more profound.
This just isn't true, for the simplest possible reason: there's more preserved literature than there is preserved graffiti. It also isn't true for the slightly less simple reason that the literature covers a much wider range of topics.
What historians desire most is driven by what they don't have now. Cuneiform tablets are so numerous that they mostly just sit around untranslated. Would they be informative if we did translate them? Of course, but the manpower isn't there. Identical documents from 3rd-century Germany would be an epic, multiple-career-making find. Those would be translated immediately.
We value things the same way. Yahoo Answers is worthless to us because we have infinite amounts of similar material, so there's no cost to destroying this subset of it.
You could try to argue that Yahoo Answers has great future value, and we should therefore preserve it, but if we followed that advice, Yahoo Answers would have no future value, because so much content like it would have been preserved. This approach fails to be logically coherent.
> In linguistics for instance graffiti can tell you things about the language and its evolution that the formal language won't communicate, like how certain letters stop being pronounced or become pronounced differently.
This certainly doesn't apply to Latin, which survives today as several robust living languages. We can easily determine how the sounds of Latin changed without making reference to graffiti.
(And of course, the formal literature has quite a bit to say on the sounds of the language, too.)
I think you underestimate just how grateful historical linguists are for popular texts beyond literary ones. Another example is the Novgorod birchbark letters, which not only shed light on old Russian but some of their features (found in no other source) required scholars to completely revise their reconstruction of Slavic historical phonology in general.
Take Native American culture for example. If we could, we would prefer actual historical events written down than just stories that's pass down through word of mouth.