It’s just been announced that Yahoo Answers, whose exclamation mark I dislike, is about to close down. This will probably mean very little to anyone who has a life. I, of course, do not. I joined in 2006, soon after it started, got to Level 7, had my account hacked, started up a new one and am now again on Level 7, with 72 819 points. Lately I’ve spent most of my time on Religion & Spirituality (usually known as R&S), the LGBT section, Astronomy and Space, Gender Studies, Languages and Other – Cultures & Groups, which is actually about ethnicity and racism. I’ve made friends online using the place, some of whom are now Facebook friends. It has been a colossal waste of time in some ways, but not others. I don’t really know what I’m going to do now it’s closing down. I can imagine myself typing in the URL and finding myself unable to ask any questions before I remember it’s gone, and then being sad or engaging in some kind of displacement activity, probably on here.
I didn’t find it useless, although I answered far more questions than I asked. It went downhill rapidly from about 2012, partly due to poor moderation, but it was never exactly marvellous. It was mainly known for ridiculous questions, sometimes unwittingly so, one of which was of course “Why does steam come out of my vagina?”, to which the answer is that if you urinate in the cold, steam will appear to emerge from below, specifically from the urethral meatus. It took me a while to work that one out. It also got very repetitive, for various reasons. One was that a lot of people on there are quite compulsive, another was that people didn’t always get the answers they wanted or needed, and another is people not using the search facility. However, it is useful to know what people don’t know. Off the top of my head, here are some of the most common questions:
- What is the Universe expanding into?
- Why are there atheists in Religion & Spirituality?
- If humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?
- Am I pretty?
- Am I pregnant?
- Did the moon landing (singular) really happen?
- Variations on “Why are most women bi?”
To be honest, there are loads of these I can’t even remember right now. It’s useful as a place to work out what you really think about something, because “there are no stupid questions”. One of the reasons I started blogging is that I got tired of typing out the same old answers to the same old questions over and over again. I have some standard answers to the above:
- Space is not a container of items but a relationship combining direction and distance. The maximum possible distance between two locations is constantly increasing. The Universe is not expanding into anything.
- This place is about religion, not the promotion of a particular religious point of view.
- Humans are cladistically monkeys and evolved from tarsier-like forms known as omomyids native to North America in the Eocene Epoch. If America was settled by Europeans, why are there still Europeans?
- People should not be judged by their appearance.
- (Don’t answer).
- Yes, go to clavius.org . This question is asked a lot on here.
- According to Kinsey’s survey, 18% of women have orgasmed at the thought or action of other women, and 27% of men have done the same with other men. Therefore it’s likely that more men are bisexual than women.
The facility to comment on answers was removed “temporarily” some time ago, apparently because it tended to be used for bullying. This was a pity, as it also meant one couldn’t get feedback on one’s answers. There was also a vast amount of trolling and poes. In case you don’t know, Poes (as opposed to the Tellytubby Po) are named after Poe’s Law, which is the idea that in some circumstances it’s impossible to tell whether someone is in earnest or not because of the extremism of certain people’s opinions.
There was also, I think, a strong element of mental health issues on there. Sometimes this was entirely evident, such as people who considered themselves Targeted Individuals, and in that case it was interesting because they would block people who tried to help. In other cases, and I know this is a deprecated classification, they were neurotic rather than psychotic, and I would count myself in that number because without wishing to detract from people who are officially diagnosed, there was something obsessive and driven about my urge to answer. I can remember one day when it was practically all I did apart from eating and visiting the bathroom, and once I noticed that, I restrained myself. There were certain questions which were clearly being asked by the same person over and over again for months or years on end. There was, for example, a largely inexplicable series of questions on the design of the Collins Submarine Program, an Australian naval undertaking which seemed to have gone over-budget or been mismanaged in some way which had really raised the dander of a particular presumed ex-employee. Another one repeatedly referred to “unruly women priests”, which always made me think of bad hair days. One of the most recent attempted to contrast “trans” with “normal” as opposed to “cis”, and there were I hope unsubstantiated rumours about the person posting those questions which I won’t repeat here. And this is the thing. You could never work out why the questions were really being posted, who had an axe to grind or whether anything they said was true, and if not whether they were lying or deceived.
It wasn’t helped by the fact that it was basically abandoned by moderators. Questions could be removed easily with a complaint without any apparent review of their content, although this never happened to me so far as I can remember.
It seems that I now have the chance to download my content if I wish. I shudder to think how big that file might be, because given both accounts it amounts to fifteen years of possible timewasting. One personally interesting aspect of it is that it would probably catalogue my disillusionment with Christianity in the mid-‘noughties, coming back to the Church at the end of that decade and various other developments since.
It’s easy to become contemptous of others in that environment, perhaps by osmosis from other users, and I hope I resisted that. It’s a test of character to use such a place without succumbing to the sociopathy, but I think I succeeded. There were local celebrities, notably a Methodist woman called Fireball who I personally liked but was unaccountably hated by many other users.
Probably the saddest thing about all this is that there are probably people out there who just want to know things like how to fix their brake lights or have their spelling and grammar checked by a human being who aren’t going to be able to do that now. I will definitely miss the place, and unfortunately it probably means you’re going to get a lot more blogs. Sorry.
A Box Of Chocolates 