Yahoo Answers

I love how they don't filter or censor the content posted by users. This makes the responses very rich in a wide variety of opinions and takes on the subject of asked questions. I think it definitely beats Ask (just my opinion)

Many users are very rude and juvenile, and the quality of answers-- and questions too for that matter -- is poor. There are more trolls than there are helpful people in the politics and religion sections. The rudest and most insulting answers often get the most thumbs up.

The site could be cleaned up if Yahoo did not rely on user reporting to police the site. One higher level user can actually report and have a question deleted. And, as I imply, many users are unfair. If they don't like a question or answer they will delete it.
What happens is that racist, obscene, insulting, ridiculously childish, personal attacks, and even threatening questions and answers often remain, while perfectly innocent questions and answers are deleted.

This can be proved by a google search: keyword site: answers.yahoo.com.

What Yahoo needs to do is police the site themselves.

I was an active member on the Ramadan section of Yahoo answers and I thought it would be a good place to learn about the Islamic religion. Boy was I wrong. Unfortunately, that place is filled with potential Islamic terrorists and many white supremacists who literally said they would kill all Muslims if they had a gun. That place needs some serious monitoring, and the monitoring should be escalated to people who have more authority than simple online mods.

I asked if somebody knew about the name of a coach wallet found very similar question about other items. I received a letter from the Geastapo, sorry yahoo answer with a quiz the questions were ambiguos, and some even absurd and the answer were even worst. Is not a violation to brive offering points, yet anything can imply you want to chat or something else. Who make those guidelines people that scaped the victorian era or Mc Carthism?

I have had 3 of my questions that I asked removed because they apparently "violated the Community Guidelines". I read over these guidelines very carefully afterwards and found absolutely nothing wrong with them. One of my questions that was removed was asking for opinions on what could be causing my stomach discomfort with a a description of my symptoms. I didn't use any "hateful words" or "exploiting the community". Obviously there are trigger words or phrases that have your question flagged immediately.

I like this site the best of all the answer type of sites. I can quickly locate the topic I am after and be able to read a few different Q & A to determine more about that topic. Usually I read half a dozen or more about the same idea, so I can get different perspective and be able to formulate some of my own thinking about it.

Of course, not all of the people who give answer input know what they are talking about, but that is ok too as it still shows the willingness of community involvement and participation. I think it is good also for the fact that we can dispel misinformation by seeing what is not true about ideas we are interested in.

When I had a simple question, I'd type it into Google and many of times it led me to Yahoo Answers and I found the answers mostly helpful. From this, I decided to open a Yahoo Account. Within a day I was thoroughly disappointed with the website. I had an innocent question about my dog and I received a comment which quoted "idiot." This infuriated me and I decided to look into the person being so cruel. I discovered many times where they had been very judgmental despite not knowing the full story of the person's question. And this person was receiving many points by simply criticizing and hurting people. I think this is disgusting seeing as they had been like this on many occasions and no one had commented or even flagged them for their behaviour.

Yahoo Answers could improve their website by giving the asker authority to remove a cruel answer if necessary. Stupid questions which have also been posted for the asker's amusement should be checked before posting and then removed if need be.

I find yahooanswers to be entertaining at best. You will get some good advice sometimes but you will also get a lot of silly answers or unrelated to the question you ask.

I find a lot of people ask very detailed questions but won't wait around for a good answer. In other words if you write a detailed answer to the person that asked the question they will have already moved on before they see your answer. What this causes is one liner answers and not very good ones at that.

I think if they would make everyone wait a couple minutes before their answers appear it might make some people actually give good answers.

I think you should give it a try and see if you like it.

One feature of this site is the ability to post questions "anonymously" and as a result, should you use that feature someone goes through and has your questions removed along with everyone else's who posts "anonymously" (regardless of context or content) and your account gets suspended by the Yahoo Answers team. I decided I wasn't paying for Yahoo to be able to suspend my service, so am "firing" Uverse as my provider.

Yahoo is a little high handed in suspending email accounts and services if they feel your political beliefs are not in line with theirs. I still believe we have a Constitution in the USA.
I emailed Yahoo three times and got no answers back or any explanation about how long they planned to block me from Answers.
Uverse suggested using Outlook or gmail.

Website owners use Yahoo Answers to drive traffic and improve SEO - I never understood why anyone would bother posting answers to questions on Yahoo Answers. Then I figured it out - people trying to promote their own websites. These people answer questions all the time so they can put the URL of their website into their post signature. I think some people believe each of these inbound links will increase their search ranking on Google, but these are NO FOLLOW links, so I don't think it will work for them. However, if you answer a lot of questions well on Yahoo Answers you will get a decent amount of traffic to your site (particularly if you get selected as a "best answer"). To me, this seems like a lot of work for 20-30 referrals/day. But I suppose if their posts are very topical each referral could be pretty valuable. Here's thread discussing this: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=*******