Today, in the era of smart speakers, in which a question, pronounced with the name of the device in the head, corresponds to an answer – more or less exhaustive – there is no longer a time for doubts. Even earlier, Google engulfed (and engulfed) the queries affixed to the search string.
But before that, when Google was not yet trained to answer our questions, there was a time when the digital oracle was a forum, branded Yahoo. When Wikipedia was still in its infancy, Answers was the virtual place where you could ask everything, really everything.
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The answer was not an algorithm, but the users themselves who, from the height of their experience and wisdom, suggested the “answers” to anyone who had a question to submit to the world-wide-web. A gigantic cauldron in which questions on the most disparate themes converged, from the most serious to the facetious ones: sex, do-it-yourself, music, cinema, but also politics, history, empirical and philosophical questions.
But it was above all the lack of moderation in the comments and in the publication of the questions that allowed Yahoo Answers to become a platform where you can also have fun by publishing deliberately crazy questions (or at least this is the hope we all had), in which irony and humor went beyond the intent to satisfy a doubt.
But also the example of one of the reasons why the online service will disappear, next May 4th, submerged by the problems of moderation and the advent of social networks that made it obsolete. An instrument created to be of public utility and which over time has been trapped in a grotesque dimension.