Yahoo! Answers

About

Yahoo! Answers is an online knowledge exchange community where users can ask and/or answer questions about virtually anything, as long as the subject matter does not violate the site's community guidelines.^[28] Since the site launch in 2005,^[29] the crowdsourced question-and-answer (Q&A) platform has become a popular target of online ridicule and trolling, due to the prevalence of poor grammar and inaccuracies in the user-generated content.

History

The Q&A community website Yahoo!Answers made its online debut on June 28th, 2005, to replace the Ask Yahoo!, a similar Q&A community owned and operated by the multinational Internet technology company Yahoo!, which became discontinued in March 2006 as a result of the rebranded launch. According to Bradley Horowitz, the-then Vice President of Product Strategy at Yahoo, the website was relaunched to focus more on rewarding its users for participation through a point-earning system, which had proven to be an effective incentive model for other successful Q&A communities, most notably the South Korean search portal Naver's Knowledge Search service.

Features

Similar to other comparable crowdsourced Q&A communities, Yahoo! Answers allows any Yahoo! ID-registered user to answer a pre-existing question and/or submit a new question; prior to the update of the scoring system in 2012, newcomers to the community were required to answer at least one question and maintain a positive score balance of five points or more in order to submit a new question. All questions submitted to the site remain actively open for four days, during which any user may post an answer and the original poster (OP) can highlight a specific response as the "Best Answer." Prior to another site update in 2014, users other than the OP were able to select the "Best Answer" democratically through an open voting process. Furthermore, exceptionally helpful user contributions are occasionally curated on the official Yahoo! Answers Blog by the staff.

The Point System

Upon registration, each user begins at level 1 after receiving 100 free points and may work his/her way up to level 7 by earning additional points through further participation on the site. When a user's response to a question gets highlighted by the OP as the "Best Answer," the contributor is awarded 10 points per post. While accumulating points and leveling up on the site have no real world value, users can unlock access to additional features and moderation privileges as they progress up the ladder (shown below). In addition to the automated system of points and levels, the staff may award extra points to users for outstanding contribution on a case-by-case basis.

Languages

Similar to Wikipedia, the Yahoo! Answers community at large is comprised of 12 localized sites by different languages: Chinese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai and Vietnamese.

Online Presence

Since its launch in 2005, Yahoo! Answers has gained much online notoriety for its overabundance of humorous and often absurd questions and answers. As a result, the site has been described by many viral media blogs and news outlets as an Internet troll community and a popular source of internet memes, the notable instances of which are disseminated in the form of screenshot images, similar to how funny Google Search Suggestions are spread.

Related Memes

How Is Babby Formed

How Is Babby Formed is a grammatically incorrect question originally submitted by Yahoo! Answers user Kavya in 2006. After the post was featured on Something Awful's weekly column "Weekend Web," the question went on to spawn a series of multimedia parodies and tributes all over the Internet.

Penis Inspection Day

Penis Inspection Day refers to a copypasta story about a gym teacher who insists on examining a student’s genitalia for an ostensibly routine health inspection that could be interpreted as a child molestation.

Cover Myself in Vaseline and Pretend I'm a Slug

Cover Myself in Vaseline and Pretend I’m a Slug is a joke statement posted to forums and comment boards to elicit a reaction. It is often used as an example of a Google Search Suggestion, due to the its bait-and-switch nature.

Search Interest

External References