The honor of being the first internet practice falls to the hands of Yahoo! via Yahoo! Answers, a platform where any user could ask a question, however absurd it might seem, to obtain answers of all kinds. While some considered this platform as an answer to any doubt, others took it as a inexhaustible source of humordue both to the seriousness with which the questions were posed and to the certainty with which they were answered by the community.
The origin
Yahoo! Answers was a question and answer platform that was born late 2005 where anyone put post a question to get an answer from anyone, regardless of whether they had knowledge on the subject or not. Unlike similar platforms that have been coming to the market since then, in Yahoo! Answers there was no user rating system, nor was there a profile where users could briefly explain why they felt they had the right knowledge to answer the questions.
The home page of Yahoo! Answers consisted of 3 tabs: Reply, Discover and Vote. The Answer tab showed the most recent questions that had been posted on the platform, while Discover found the most popular questions on the platform, those that had a large number of views and responses from the community. in the Vote tab, there were questions in survey format.
All the questions that were published on this platform were distributed in 25 categoriesamong which were Art and Humanities, Eating and Drinking, Pregnancy and Maternity, Pets, Computers and WWW, Health and Beauty, Society and Culture and Travel among others.
users could value the answers as positive or negative and the one with the highest positive score was highlighted first, which allowed other people to find the most satisfactory answer from the community to the question that had led them to Yahoo! Answers.
Yahoo! announces its closure
Yahoo! is a clear example of how it does not have to be managed an internet company. Throughout its history, and until it was finally sold to Verizon in 2016 for just $4.8 billion, many CEOs have passed through Yahoo! Each of the top managers that the board of directors put in charge of the company seems to have the objective of sinking the company.
Although it is true that he also made decisions that would not make sense today, such as letting go of the Google search engine in 1998 when its creators offered it to him (Google had not proven anything at that time), others were taken without analyzing and they had a very negative impact on the company causing it to lose many millions of dollars.
Yahoo! Answers closed its activity on the internet on May 4, 2021. The reason given by the company was that the popularity of this platform had fallen a lot in recent years, largely due to the fact that Google offered the same information, but, unlike Yahoo’s solution ! offering proven information published by the media and not by users whose intention was nothing other than to troll.
Starting in early 2023, Yahoo! has ceased to be one content access platform and currently focuses its activity on offering information through its own search engine, a change that it made overnight without informing about the reasons that led to this decision, but most likely they are related to the change direction of the company after being sold to Verizon.
Alternatives to Yahoo! Answers
One of the best alternatives in Spanish to Yahoo! Answers is Quora, a platform with a very similar operation but where each user has their own profile where they can explain what reasons enable them to answer the question in order to offer credibility or reliability to the answers. Another interesting alternative is found in AskReddit Espanol, the light version of the veteran Reddit in the language of Cervantes.
