Close Yahoo Answers
I believe you should close Yahoo Answers because it has become as filled with spam and junk as Yahoo comments was before it was closed.
Right before Yahoo News comments were closed, I was seeing racist attacks there regularly and, given the weak range of features, most debates or discussions were impossible to track in any meaningful way - such that backlash to either propaganda or blatantly fake quotes on information pieces was hard to make visible (likely because of sorting by newest comment and not highest rated comment). To be brief, they were a disaster and I do not long for them in their absence.
Yahoo Answers has a similar issue, but it's a bit more nuanced. Overwhelmingly, posts which are made by anonymous users are leading, contain no useful info worth responding to, and stray far from their intended area. Case and point, the Global Warming questions area is filled with spam questions, Gender Studies is filled with many variants of the "why are feminists just the worst" question, and politics is filled with attacks and misinformation in the form of questions routinely.
While this would seem somewhat manageable with a clean-up/ban wave, the fact that misinformation prospers when the people asking the leading questions can simply report you're detailed answer and leave up the spamming "yes men", means that the role of YA as a resource is tarnished daily and hourly.
Likewise with my suggestion for comments, either update the tool so that people can opt in to communities and the types of content they'd like to see (i.e. remove anonymous questions so people can actually block the trolls) or, better yet, just close the forum. Little is actually done of substance and, save a few people asking homework questions while clearly in mid-exam or people asking for obscure relationship advice, nothing would be lost. If people still have questions, direct them to some subreddit where there are already full-time moderators equipped for the task of parsing wheat from chaff and banning trolls.
Henry Maxwell
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