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Abstract
When Yahoo! announced the closure of Yahoo! Answers (Y!A) in April 2021, many across the web humorously equated it to the burning of the Library of Alexandria in 48 BCE. Lacking the drama of a destructive fire, its closure reignited public concern for the preservation of digital content. Even as a joke, the comparison is apt: the decline of Y!A, and the rush to save its contents before their deletion, exposes the complex dynamics of platform closure and web archiving. In this article, we use the Y!A incident as a case study for better understanding the deaths and afterlives of internet platforms. After examining the effects of these closures on platforms' user communities and the actions taken to save this kind of media, we propose changes to the valuation of digital media artifacts and the practices of internet preservation.
Introduction
On the morning of April 5, 2021, Yahoo! made a surprise announcement which sent shockwaves throughout the digital world: Yahoo! Answers (Y!A), its infamous user-generated question-andanswer service, would be permanently shuttered in about a month's time. Soon it seemed as though the entire internet had entered a period of public mourning for a site which had grown into something of an internet mainstay over the course of its fifteen year lifespan. While it had been genuinely useful for some, Yahoo! Answers also gained notoriety as a treasure trove of outlandish and borderline incoherent posts. Over the years, a handful of these posts have transformed into iconic memes including, of course, "how is prangent formed"-a video montage of questions about pregnancy rife with misspellings and woeful naivety. This video, originally uploaded to YouTube in 2016 by user J.T. Sexkik, currently has over 44 million views.1 Nowadays its comment section has become something of a living memorial for Y!A, of blessed memory.
The announcement quickly sparked concern for what might happen to Y!A's vast repository of user-generated content, with many expressing genuine interest in its preservation. A flurry of retrospectives and op-eds decried the closure, framing it as an attack on cultural preservation and a threat to collective memory.2 Perhaps most memorably, viral posts on Twitter and elsewhere likened the site's closure to the burning of the Library of Alexandria in 48 BCE. It was...