Yahoo! Answers
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Yahoo! Answers is a community-driven question-and-answer website or a knowledge market from Yahoo!, that allows users to both submit questions to be answered and answer questions asked by other users.
This site is infamous for several reasons.
Why It's Rotten
Regarding the Questions and Answers
- In fact, the user who asks the question can choose the "best" answer if they want to, which actually turns out to be the worst answer.
- In the site's earlier years, users could vote on a best answer; this feature was later removed due to users abusing the system to earn points.
- Questions that appear to be lies that don't make any sense.
- The quality of both the questions and answers are becoming more ridiculous than ever. Just look at this!
- Answers that only "answer" the title of the question. Here are some examples.
- Pointless "answers" that are not related to the topic. Examples of these are answers than ask the question which is very ironic.
- Answers that resort to ad hominem attacks for no reason.
- There are questions (alongside with their descriptions) that seem to be offensive (either being racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.)
- Poor moderation in general (with reasons mentioned earlier):
- Many spambots don't get banned
- There have been many cases of teenage users sharing child pornography on the Men's Health categories
- Not much to prevent users from submitting joke/troll or otherwise unhelpful answers
- Point-gaming (the process of gaining points just for the sake of gaining points) remains rampant despite being strictly prohibited by the Community Guidelines (which nobody seems to read), and the fact that asking questions no longer costs points (and picking a best answer now gives double points) makes it even easier to get away with.
- The Community Guidelines does not forbid the use of multiple accounts (unless it's for point-gaming, and even that is easy to get away with), meaning a person can report users they dislike (even if they're doing nothing wrong) using many accounts and get away with it.
- For that matter, there is no penalty when filing a false report.
- In August 2019, Level 7 users were stripped of their rights to move others' questions to different categories. The removal had its upsides, but for the most part, it counted as a victory for trolls, who can now ask their questions in highly populated sections to get more exposure and attention.
- In mid-2020, Yahoo removed the ability to comment on answers, which sparked a massive backlash on the site.
Regarding the users
- Basically, SO MANY TROLLS.
- Spambots. Such as making "This Site Might Help You" spam "answers".
- By the same token as the above two, there are many one-gimmick trolls that post the exact same questions and/or answers again and again for no reason beyond shock value.
- Many users are SJWs. There are also many far-right users, racists, sexists, perverts, and creationists on the website too.
- Because giving any answer adds to a user's points, many users post completely useless answers such as "I don't know", "Hi", or just random things which have nothing to do with the question.
- Some users disrespect opinions.
- Copycats, copycats everywhere!
- Even many non-trolls (particularly Level 7 users) are known for having rude, elitist attitudes.
- The Global Warming section is rarely used to discuss climate change anymore; nowadays, many users use it as a dumping ground for pointless questions in the same vein as the Polls & Surveys section.
- Due to the massive amount of trolls on the site, many users become skeptical of innocent questions and refuse to give good answers to them.
Miscellaneous
- The website has a very poor design and can be a pain to navigate, especially post-2019 when the website was completely revamped in a misguided attempt to appeal to mobile users.
- Yahoo/Verizon has gotten extremely lazy with maintaining the site; they never disabled the Christmas theme after 2019, meaning certain words (e.g. Santa, Christmas) were colored red and green even when it was nowhere near Christmas time.
The Only Redeeming Qualities
- There are some users who take their questions and answers seriously.
- A few of the worst parts of the site have been removed. For instance, the site used to automatically mark an answer to each question as the "best answer" if the asker didn't manually do so, but this is no longer the case.
- Although Yahoo's decision to remove the ability for Level 7 users to move questions was a victory for trolls for the most part, there were indeed many Level 7 users abusing their privileges and moving questions they didn't like (regardless of whether they were troll posts or not); after the removal of the feature, common dumping ground categories (e.g. Mental Health, Abuse & Spam, People with Disabilities) were cleaned up.
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