Yahoo Answers and Death by Design

I've been a member of Yahoo Answers since 6th of June 2006 - I know, ominous date - I've seen the site be quite busy at times with the rate of questions being asked too much to keep up with.  My regular haunt was the Programming and Design section where I was often a top contributor and still hold my place in the top 10 contributors for that section. 

In the last year or so Yahoo has slowly changed the design of it's site, and in the last few months it has begun migrating each of the regional variations to the new design.  The old one was green and instantly recognisable, to the point where many of you who were no doubt sent there at some point by Google can probably recall.  The new design however in my opinion is horrible, and it would seem I am not alone in that opinion, to the point where the backlash from users has been quite vocal.  A backlash which Yahoo has decided to ignore.

Many sites redesign themselves periodically and while sites like facebook often have outspoken critics who reject their new designs, the masses eventually "like it or lump it" - however in most of those scenarios I would argue the redesign is most rejected due to the fact it's a change, not because it's inherently bad.  Yahoo answers I believe falls into the latter category.

Earlier today I had a look at the activity on Yahoo answers and found that in a 2 hour period there had been 18 questions asked in the programming and design section.  Looking at the All Categories page there had been around 140 questions asked in 5 minutes across all categories on the site.

There are 23 categories devoted to Yahoo Products.  There are a further 1,522 categories totalling 1,545 categories in English alone - I might have missed some, and many of them were empty when I was looking through the site.

These figures are all taken from Yahoo Answers, set to show all English questions. Looking at those figures as a whole if that rate is maintained then there's approx 1,700 questions being asked per hour in English across all categories on the site that's just over 1 question per hour per category.  Restricting the view to questions from the UK only there had only been 200 questions in the preceding hour - that's 16 questions ever 5 minutes in comparison to the 140 asked across all English sites [11.4%]

As for the engagement of people answering the questions,  across all English questions within the last 3 weeks there have been approximately 600 questions that have received 20 or more answers.  That's approximately 30 questions per day that manage to get more than 20 responses.  The same search restricted to UK only returned 100 questions in the last 3 weeks that gained 20 or more responses, approximately 5 questions per day.

For a site that had 200 million active users worldwide, with 25 million unique visitors in the US per month alone, racking up 62 million visits to the site, that's incredibly low levels of engagement, far below the 1% rule which I have mentioned on this blog before.

It beggars the question, has Yahoo killed Yahoo Answers?

Addendum:

Upon request for date and time clarifications I have gathered new data.  At 15:00 on the 23rd of January, there had been:

13 questions asked in Programming and design within the preceding 2 hours [All English]
2 questions asked in Programming and design within the preceding 2 hours [UK only]

120 questions asked in All Categories in the preceding 5 minutes [All English]
This extrapolates to 1,440 questions being asked per hour across all English sites.

18 questions asked in All Categories in the preceding 5 minutes [UK only]
This would extrapolate to 216 questions per hour for the UK only however the time period and number of questions was low enough to count, there have been 137 questions in the UK in the preceding hour - approx 64% of the extrapolated figure so if that applied to the global rate too then that 1,440 would be reduced to 922

Update:

It will come as little surprise to anyone but Yahoo Answers formally shutdown on May 14th 2021 after a period of sustained decline.  The writing was on the wall it seems now looking back at this post.