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Yahoo Answers — perhaps the internet’s largest repository of stupid questions — is on its last leg.
Yahoo plans to shut down the question-and-answer message board for good in May, ending a nearly 16-year run.
The Verizon-owned media outfit announced the move at the top of the Yahoo Answers homepage. The forum will stop accepting new submissions on April 20 before it becomes inaccessible and redirects to the Yahoo homepage starting May 4.
Yahoo reportedly attributed the move to waning interest in the forum, which launched in 2005 as a place for internet users to crowdsource answers to their most burning questions and went on to become a gushing font of viral humor.
“While Yahoo Answers [was] once a key part of Yahoo’s products and services, it has become less popular over the years as the needs of our members have changed,” the company wrote in a note to active Yahoo Answers users, according to The Verge.
“To that end, we have decided to shift our resources away from Yahoo Answers to focus on products that better serve our members and deliver on Yahoo’s promise of providing premium trusted content.”
Yahoo Answers fans mourned the service’s impending demise on social media by recalling times when the site was genuinely helpful and unintentionally hilarious.
Many people on Twitter — where “Yahoo” became a trending topic early Tuesday — recalled ridiculous questions such as “How can I tell if my neighbors are raptors?,” “Can spiders have fun?” and “Are there birds in Canada?”
Others resurfaced a classic compilation of Yahoo Answers queries misspelling the word “pregnant” that’s racked up 40 million views on YouTube since 2016.
“Listen I’m no business expert but for the sake of comedy and history and think yahoo answers needs to stay,” one person tweeted.
Users will be able to download archives of the questions and answers they’ve posted in the platform until June 30, Yahoo says.
But some commenters argued the company wasn’t giving users enough time to salvage a piece of the internet’s history before wiping it away forever.
“The story is that American Tech would burn the library of Alexandria if their lawyers and accountants told them it’s no longer earning money,” Aria Salvatrice wrote on Twitter. “One month notice is an insult.”
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