Why is Yahoo Answers shutting down?

I guess the question isn’t entirely clear to you. You might think it’s just a typo or a slip-of-the-pen left in the article’s title. But that’s not the case at all!

The title of this article is a real question that appeared on Yahoo Answers, the famous platform where people could post any question on any topic and get replies from anyone willing to answer.

In this specific case, the question garnered 13 replies, including the correct one: the actual title of the song, which is none other than “Should I stay or should I go”, the famous track by The Clash!

The interesting news is not so much that the question found an answer (including some rather funny ones!), but the fact that after 16 years, Yahoo! decided to shut down Yahoo Answers.

This was the announcement posted on the website: “The Yahoo Answers site will shut down on May 4, 2021 (Eastern Time) and will be in read-only mode starting April 20, 2021 (Eastern Time). There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account.”

This marks the end of a service that made internet history: launched in late 2005, Yahoo Answers enjoyed immediate success. In the pre-social media era, Yahoo Answers was a valuable tool for anyone wanting to easily interact with others and find answers to those questions they were probably too embarrassed to ask in public.

However, a question naturally arises: if it is true that no innovation lasts forever, why are other similar platforms still active? Let’s try to analyze the issue from the perspective of the Impact Innovation framework, comparing Yahoo Answers with Quora, one of the most famous Q&A platforms still active today.

The first element of the Impact Innovation framework is the impact proposition. In other words, it is the value proposition for which my customer should choose me over other solutions available on the market.
In the case of Yahoo Answers, the impact proposition was quite simple: as stated in the announcement explaining the reasons behind the platform’s closure, “we launched Yahoo Answers sixteen years ago to help people around the world connect and share information.”

From this perspective, it is not very different from Quora’s impact proposition: “To share and grow the world’s knowledge.”
To Quora’s disadvantage, it is worth remembering that the site was launched in 2010 – a full 5 years after the advent of Yahoo Answers – by two former Facebook employees, Adam D’Angelo (former CTO) and Charlie Cheever.

The two impact propositions are very similar. There are no substantial differences in terms of idea, positioning, and overall customer promise.
The major differences between the two platforms, as is often the case with innovation, lie in the details.

The second element of the Impact Innovation framework is the broad-spectrum solution. In other words, once the impact proposition has been identified, it must be broken down into the essential elements that make up any solution, specifically:

• Product System: identifies the features of the product and its complementary products, which are useful for expanding the functionalities of the core product. This is the element that companies usually focus on the most.
• Business System: identifies how the organization is structured to manufacture the product or deliver the service, and how it plans to generate revenue through the innovative solution.
• Customer Experience System: identifies how customers experience the company’s solution, not just during its use but throughout the entire lifecycle of the solution itself.

The more I can leverage and combine these various elements, the more effective I will be at creating a broad-spectrum solution. Broad-spectrum solutions are the result of integrating multiple elements; as a result, they are difficult to copy and maintain their market value for much longer.
Let’s try to analyze some of the differences between Yahoo Answers and Quora considering the Product System, Business System, and Customer Experience System elements.

From an end-product perspective, the two solutions are quite similar, although Quora has developed better categorization for its various questions and therefore delivers a product experience superior to that of Yahoo Answers.

The biggest differences, however, lie within the Customer Experience and Business System.
Regarding the former, Quora has developed a different mechanism for user engagement, specifically the A2A (Asked to Answer) system. On Quora, a user can direct a question to a specific group of other users—selected based on their expertise or past answers—to increase the likelihood of getting a valid response. Yahoo Answers, on the other hand, engaged its users through a points-based system based on the answers they provided.

From a Business System perspective, however, Quora focused on creating a higher-profile user network to consistently maintain a high quality of answers. In fact, during its initial phase, Quora was invite-only, and various experts were brought in to ensure a top-tier level of response quality. This, in turn, caused the standard of the questions to grow over time as well.
Another crucial aspect Quora concentrated on was the moderation process: users who violated moderation policies could have their questions and answers deleted. This could happen because of incorrect answers, trolling, or joke responses.
This once again fostered the creation of high-quality content on Quora. Yahoo Answers, on the other hand, always paid less attention to moderation. Any user could publish a question or an answer about anything, and on whatever they wished.