My problem with Yahoo answers is the number of times I've come across answers that are out right wrong (sometimes to the point of being dangerous) and supported by a number other people, with no right answer in sight. For this reason I completely avoid Yahoo answer regarding any topic I'm ignorant of.

This is the reason why I occasionally do answer question on YA! If nobody comes in to fix the obvious errors, it will always be full of nonsense.

The real danger is that the site is used buy a lot of young people who will consistently walk away with a completely skewed and incorrect notion of the subject they are asking about.

As they say: "Be the change you want to see around you".

I'm not sure that grassroots corporate welfare through band-aiding a broken, crappy product with a sewer for a community and zero moderation is what Ghandi really had in mind, there.

Much more effective would be to advance the cause of workable communities or products while starving out the page views of ones beyond repair.

The name is Gandhi, not Ghandi.

And Gandhi never added qualifiers to his statement. As a matter of fact, the more broken a system is, the more it needs good people to step up and affect change.

I was looking around recently for some information on antidepressant medications. A lot of them have nasty side effects or leave people "happy but empty" and I was curious whether there was any advice regarding these things. One answer which had been left there for a year with no moderation included the following gem: "I recommend you stop all forms of antidepressants and if you get too depressed then just end it. suicide is an option for all people."

Suffice it to say I now avoid Yahoo answers as well.

I don't think this is just yahoo bashing, it succiently reflects user experience. If you see a yahoo answers link in your search results, do you think "aha, I will click on this first because it probably answers my question"? I get happy when I see stackoverflow in my google results, because I suspect that I will actually get my question answered by clicking that link. A yahoo answers page may or may not be informative, about as often as a geocities page may or may not have useful information on it. Nothing about the site actually really encourages quality, so you end up very hit or miss.

For programming tasks, I am happy to see SO. But for other life inquiries, such as "why does my dog sleep at my feet", I get decent answers from Yahoo. In fact, I never viewed SO as a Yahoo! competitor, but a good complement - their audiences are different, and SO fills a nice niche that Yahoo's demographic is usually not capable of filling

I looked up that question.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Aj_AlHhmSE3TfJp...

Best answer, chosen by voters begins with: "I dont know the answer to your question."

The rest are a bunch of random guesses by people who don't really know anything about the topic. That's actually exactly the sort of thread I am disappointed to find when I ask a question like that. I could just ask the nearest person or call my mother and get more or less the same results. Honestly, if I spent 30 seconds brainstorming I would probably come up with at least half of that list of answers. I'd turn to the web for slightly more detail and authority, which isn't in evidence there at all.

That being said, I have been surprised at the number of times I've found relevant answers. It's more often than I expect, even if it's not as often as I'd like, and I do find the quality of Yahoo Answers to be less consistent than Stack Exchange,

I agree, I like having yahoo answers in my search result and I can't remember any-day when I was disappointed by answers. Even their answers is peer reviewed and voted for.

Teenage chat? Seriously?