Why did Yahoo Answers fail while Ask Reddit is still going strong?
Both platforms are mostly anonymous. Both platforms attract a wide range of users. Both platforms have a small percentage of excellent Q&As mixed in with a sea of garbage. And yet, Yahoo Answers is shutting down in just a few weeks. Ask Reddit, on the other hand, shows no sign of slowing down. What do you think the difference is?
Answers ( 3 )
I started using Yahoo! Answers in 2008 and up until around 2012 to 2013 it was a very popular community of users but it was not and was never intended to be an encylopedia or a University. It waa a "community." If you asked serious questions, you almost always got serious answers, which I did when I asked about computer issues and home improvement projects. But the site was also about entertainment, and Yahoo itself solicited questions that were "delightfully trivial." So people were inviited to engage in a level of silliness and humor, and a lot of the content was hilarious. And a lot of it was genuinely sad; lost souls just trying to figure something out. I don't know how many times I counseled someone to "just hang on, time will cure this heartbreak, or at least make it more bearable."
Anyway, people say Y!A lacked moderation but this is not so. Moderation is actually what started the Y!A death plunge. There was always reporting on content and it did generally work...if enough people reported an offensive post, it would get deleted. And there was an appeals process that would restore questions incorrectly reported. But Y!A ramped this up around 2009 and created a cadre of "trusted reporters" who by themselves could delete a post by their single report. I was one of them but used this power sparingly, reporting only things like spam, pornography, threats, pedophilia and etc. But around 20 or so Trusted Reporters were very serious about the site and it's guidelines, and would report ANYTHING that did not comply with their narrow vision of "the rules." I started to refer to these people as the Hall Monitors...you know, like those Perfect Kids in Grade School who were appointed to watch for line infractions in the hallways of James Buchanan Elementary. For example, one of the Yahoo Guidelines was that your response to a question must answer the question. But often the questions were a bit incomprehensible (posted, I suspect, in many cases by people with English as a second language). If you responded by saying "I don't understand your question, please try to rephrase it," the Hall Monitors would report and delete your response because it "didn't answer the question."
Basically this over-zealous policing of what was really just a high school dance party got so bad, that by 2013 this small group of Barney Fife's had chased away a significant portion of the fun but also intelligent and often helpful core of Yahoo! Answers participants. The vacuum of their departure was replaced by more and more trolls and usage declined. Instead of reigning in the Hall Monitors a bit, Yahoo responded by redesigning the site in 2014 in what became infamously known as the "green to purple" redesign. A lot of features were removed at the time, and it was hugely unpopular, resulting in even more departures by regular users and more trolls coming in.
By 2016 Yahoo's interest in the site had decayed to the point where it was getting hacked open on a regular basis and filled with garbage...a condition that would go uncorrected for months at a time. That's when I finally stopped being a regular on the site. Some remedial efforts were made to rescue the site, but it was too little, too late.
I now suspect a big part of Verizon's decision to abandon Yahoo! Answers is because of Cancel Culture. They don't want to be seen as providing any sort of haven to the sort of politically-incorrect and obnoxious content that is prone to creep into a poorly managed platform.
Yahoo! Answers struggled mightily in maintaining trust between question askers and answerers. Because their moderation policies were so weak, they often struggled with trolls and people using the platform for their own entertainment.
Yahoo corporate never put the effort behind software development to bring the platform into the modern web age. If you look at it today, it still looks much like it did 10 years ago.
It's a shame but a cautionary tale of how great platforms can fail, even with loyal user bases.
Just from reading the reports, I'd say that Yahoo has a bigger brand and Verizon, who owns it now, wants to shed the stuff that isn't working - and Yahoo Answers isn't working, by and large.
Reddit doesn't have as much IP, so Ask Reddit is more of the same thing that it already does, if that makes sense?