Answerbag

» see answerbag.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

answerbag went online in july 2003 by joel downs, two years before yahoo answers shipped in december 2005 and three years before wikianswers opened. the pitch was the shape you would recognize from any social q&a site: post a question, other members answer, the best answer floats up, points accrue, badges, all of it. reputation systems predated stackoverflow by five years. moderator culture predated most of the modern internet's civility debates.

demand media announced the acquisition on 4 october 2006 for three million dollars in cash, via parent infosearch media. this was the same year demand media was buying every ehow-shaped content property it could pay for. answerbag was a piece of the crawlable, ad-monetizable, evergreen-search-answer content-farm strategy that ehow made famous and that would carry demand media to its 2011 ipo.

the site drifted for a decade. long-term users kept posting, but the platform got no meaningful engineering investment. 403 errors and login bugs became normal. on 15 december 2015 the site went dark with no announcement, no migration path, no data export. members lost twelve years of question threads, private messages, and the reputation they had built. some of them regrouped on answermug and fluther to grieve openly.

i was aware of the yahoo answers side of the mid-2000s english q&a explosion by osmosis, mostly through google search results for random questions. answerbag i never touched at the time and had no memory of when i sat down to write this. the tr equivalent for question-shaped knowledge was different platforms and different rhythms, so this whole english-language content-farm q&a category sat in my periphery even during its peak.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the demand media era ~

demand media's acquisition strategy read as content arbitrage. buy sites that ranked well in google, keep the content generation cheap, monetize the ad impressions. answerbag under demand became a placeholder for user-generated content that occasionally still ranked, without ever getting a serious refresh. the platform was a rounding error on the ehow business but too small to sunset until finally it was too old to keep.

~ the december death ~

the shutdown was one of the more careless in q&a history. yahoo answers gave months of warning in 2021 and offered a data export before the servers went off. answerbag gave none of that. users signed in on 15 december 2015 to find their accounts gone. threads users had spent years cultivating simply were not there. the answermug refugee thread has posts from members still asking, years later, whether their old content is anywhere at all.

~ the zombie return ~

at some point after the december 2015 kill, the answerbag domain came back online, as a shadow of the earlier site. former users have described re-entering to find something with the old brand but none of the old data. it functions less as a revival than as a headstone with the wrong writing.

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