Did it even matter?

Unfortunately, Shad, no. Y!A itself stopped mattering after the new Yahoo! Answers team made two, very poor decisions;

1. They allowed users to post anonymously, thus fueling and enabling trolling.

2. They disabled the Comments feature (as Juli mentioned).

I would have added the fact that they disabled the ability of top members to move posts to other sections, but of course once that feature started to be abused by everyone with a whim they had little choice but to disable it.

It's a shame, really, because this site was very innovative and useful when it was first conceived and launched, but like much of the internet it needs a high level of moderation to prevent the forces of ignorance, misanthropy and abusive egotism to render it useless. For the last 5 years or so it's been nothing but a massive, troll-masturbation festival.

Oh well, one less frustrating time-suck for me. Perhaps I'll see some of you in Quora. Those of you who are considering Quora however, take note: You use your real name to either post or respond, and the moderators are active and conscientious. Trolls beware.

While we can conjecture about WHY it happened (even though it's been in severe decline ever since Verizon bought it) let's do this instead:

1.  Even though your efforts were unsuccessful, did you do what you thought was right?

2.  Do you really need validation from others if that's the case?

As long as YOU did what you thought was right, I don't think it matters that much that people might choose not to recognize your efforts, or that they ultimately shut the site down anyway.

No more participants than we have here, it's amazing it crawled along this long.

I predicted this a year ago.  It's no individual troll that brought an end to Answers, but Yahoo!'s unwillingness to spend money to prop up this website.  I'm not altogether sorry this is happening. 

Answers wasn't the greatest idea from the beginning.  If you actually want information,  you can Google it.  There you have the distilled knowledge of centuries of theologians and skeptics.  No real answers can be found here. 

Conject?  We can conject, and if we do, it will be conjecture. 

Everything comes to an end, Shadow, even our own lives. I suggest you treat the end of YA like the funeral of an old friend, mourn its passing but think of the good times. Probably best not to mention the bus full of drunk trolls that crushed it to a pulp and left its mangled carcass in the gutter, rotting like a dead skunk.

What evidence do you have

that this decision to shut the site down

has the slightest thing to do with the content or users?

I suspect you overestimate your importance

and the importance of those you have been reporting.

This was a business decision.

You and those you have been trying to police

are just a bit of noise

to the owners of this site.

Their decisions are all about the Benjamins.

--

Regards,

John Popelish

I don't think the trolls had anything to do with it.

It's called change and this **** show site has had it's day.

Do you really think this has been a legit place to come for real information just within the past 5 years?

I have seen it as more of a social media outlet for a very dysfunctional family.

I'll miss the giggles but most of the fun left when they disabled comments.

Nobody could have saved this train wreck, not even you.

The one and only reason that I will never fault Yahoo! for

shutting Answers down is because in doing so, they will have

taken the trash out by preventing the corvus/wotan/shadowfire

accounts from operating here in the way that they did. 

I salute Yahoo! for their bold & gutsy decision.

too bad they did not keep the real answers team...THEY WOULD EVEN RESTORE ANSWERS THAT WERE OVERLY REPORTED FOR NOTHING!

What a hero you turned out to be! I thought you were just a regular idiot. But no, all the time you were fighting for us all. I could be wrong of course.

Nothing matters. In the end, we cease to exist, and soon after, all evidence of our existence is erased.