It can certainly be addictive, especially when you feel like you're on a roll. I admittedly "binge" like that from time to time, especially over in the math section. Though I've had some productive off-site talk too with some of the top-10 folks who know their stuff.


Answer forums such as Y!A seem to significantly attract the kind of people who insist on asking the nearest human being for answers before they at least try figuring it out on their own. As we say in the engineering world, "RTFM!"

The real tragedy is that yahoo.com itself IS a search engine. So there are lots of questions that could be answered with a 5 second search on the internet, but instead come from people who were either too incompetent or clueless to just scroll to the top of the page and do so. Though I think it's equally silly when somebody answers a question, and cites a rival site like Google as their source.

(Never mind searching Yahoo Answers itself to see if the same question has already been posted and answered there. For example, "Why is the sky blue?" has already been asked there literally over 3,000 times. That sure doesn't stop new people from asking, though.)

I'm reasonably certain that Yahoo Answers has a higher percentage of trolls than other answer forums, but the sheer amount of genuine stupidity is mind boggling.

Sometimes it's really hard to tell one from the other. In fact, I've never seen a forum where it was more ambiguous. For example, a new-comer who thinks he's really witty will post "Is the earth really round? I think it's flat." Then after reading all the hateful replies, he says "Hey, I was obviously kidding! What's wrong with you?" Then it has to be explained to the person that we honestly couldn't tell, because some people really DO post things that ARE that stupid, and with complete sincerity.

This is when I first heard of the term Poe's Law: "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing." You have to lay the sarcasm on REALLY thick there to make a joke come across as a joke.

I certainly hope you are right! Some of the questions are from WAY beyond left field. And the answers chosen as the BEST are even worse.

The truly epic one:

http://dagobah.biz/flash/babby.swf

Gave me good laugh.

And of course, we make references to this joke on the site, only to have even more misinformed people post "Why is everybody writing 'baBBy' everywhere today? It's BABY, you morons!"

Speaking of the absurdity that is Yahoo Answers, have you seen this one? (It has since been deleted by moderators there.)

Oh man... that's just incredible!

For the sake of the gene pool, may she go and try it out.

At least there's a consensus:

Complete bullshit. Everyone knows that rubbing cat pee on your face only cures curses thrown by old Mexican hags.

For an Italian curse like Il Maloccio, the only cure is to receive a happy ending massage from a hot Italian woman.

Nope, the cure for Il Mal Occhio is Il Collirio. Collirio di urina del gatto.

One of the all time most ridiculous South Park episodes. Second only to the queef episode.

And that’s saying something…

I think, yes, the answer was intended to kill the stupid "witch."
Everybody "knows" mermaids are born, not made.


She questioned the motives of the responer, but still chose it as the best answer?!?!?