Yahoo Answers

Sometimes it's hard to decide which are dumber, the questions or the answers, and there are obviously people who enjoy playing dumb as well as those that don't need to pretend. I've used it, without expectations, and if I get lucky that's a bonus. I expect most users to be on the young side of adolescent, so if I get an adult response, that's a bonus too. It's entertaining, but people have all sorts of reasons for posting to it and not all of them are going to be much help to you if you have a genuine and urgent need for advice.

It is what it is, and people aren't necessarily out to deceive you intentionally, though they might be. You should look around and get a feel for it before you pronounce judgment. Anywhere that's open as a public forum is going to be a source of unreliable information, so you have to make your own decisions on what to filter out and what to believe.

If you use it, try to find someone you can give an honest, informative answer to, instead of just complaining that nobody's doing the same for you. It's good karma.

First, all of Yahoo sucks (search, webmail, everything)

The site is full of stupid questions and even stupider (and at times even dangerous) answers, and is now nothing more than a joke

The biggest issue with Yahoo Answers is members being banned for no reason, and even worse, many have been banned not only from the Answers platform, but have had their entire Yahoo account banned, including access to their email

I have been on Yahoo Answers years ago and written an answer to a question where the asker needed to reinstall his OS (Windows XP OEM), but didn't have the restoration discs that came with his computer, I answered saying to download an XP OEM ISO from a torrent site (legal as long as you don't use the included key), burn the ISO to a CD and boot/install from it, then type in the (legal) license key from the certificate sticker affixed to the PC case, then activate

The next day, I go to log back into Answers and couldn't, I check my email (luckily they didn't ban my whole account) and noticed an email from Yahoo saying I was banned from Answers for violating their ToS (I didn't), along with a link to appeal

I wrote an appeal explaining my side (and that I in fact did not violate their ToS, and why) and sent it in, I later got an email from Yahoo in reply to my appeal, saying that my appeal didn't go through and that I did violate their ToS (again, I didn't) and they didn't even tell me where in the ToS I allegedly violated

During my time on Answers, I have witnessed the rampant racism Truth H wrote about, and none of the members writing racist questions and answers were banned