The information people are giving on Yahoo Answers is total bullshit.
This has been pissing me off for quite awhile now, but it wasn’t until today that I decided to publish this post that I had started months ago. I updated the following rant to reflect on the latest incident, but I assure you that this happens regularly.
I have a Google Alert set up for one of my websites, BabyTipsOnline.com. People link to my site fairly often in Yahoo Answers so when I see that alert in my email inbox, I always check out the page and see how and why I’m being linked to.
This morning I received this link which pointed to Yahoo Answers where a desperate mother was begging for a way to get her 13-month old daughter weaned off the bottle.
The first answer was “…the only way to stop her BS is to take the bottle away completely. If she cries or whines about it, that’s too bad. She will learn to accept the sippy cup or she will go thirsty. Show her who owns her.”
I read her profile page to find out more about her and why she was such an idiot. Turns out she’s married and trying to conceive.
Here’s a thought lady. Don’t offer advice when you have absolutely no experience and no idea of what you’re talking about!
Another woman explained her story of throwing her son’s bottles out and how he had stopped drinking for three days. THREE DAYS! If that wasn’t bad enough, he didn’t drink milk again for six months. After she details how she tortured her poor baby, she insists that “…the only way to go is cold turkey.” That dumbass should get an award for most insensitive mother EVER.
Yet another “Mother Of The Year” chimed in with her advice to “Reserve milk for meal time and juice for snack time.” Any dentist and nutritionist would slap that one upside the head. Have you ever heard of water? Or how about feeding your child REAL fruit at snack time. Pureed fruit is better than fake juice with added sugar and preservatives.
Now I’m not saying that I’m a perfect mother. Far from it. And I’m sure there will be some mothers who disagree with my opinion about bottle weaning, but I’m smart enough not to offer advice when I have no clue about it, and I’m not dumb enough to post a response just to get people to click on the “thumbs up” button. I also didn’t torture my kids and let them go for three days without anything to drink!
So, what are the two things you can take away from this? (Yes, I finally got around to it if anyone is still reading this far.)
Yahoo Answers is chock full of assholes who think they’re funny and clever, so if you’re looking for real advice, go someplace where people are more qualified to give you an honest and helpful answer.
If you’re one of the losers who post horrible answers that make the original poster feel like shit, go get a life. While you’re getting a life, take into consideration that these are real people you’re messing with. If they act on your “advice”, it can do some real damage.
Of course there are some gems in Yahoo Answers, but you have to spend a good deal of time mining through the “How do I get my girlfriend pregnant?” questions for them. It can also be a great source of free traffic to your own website or blog, but I personally believe it’s a huge waste of time answering questions yourself and using your site as a source.
I enjoy having my website linked to as a source by other people (especially since my articles offer real advice compared to the heap of trash I regularly see in YA), but the links are “nofollow” so I can only enjoy the free traffic and not any link juice.
If you do decide to, or are already using YA to generate traffic, please be careful as to how you’re representing yourself. Your goal is to establish yourself as an expert, so don’t use your website as a source if it’s total rubbish.
Put a lot of thought into your answers. Don’t be a clever prick just to get fans. And don’t forget that your answers may come back to haunt you. If you wouldn’t want your mother or grandmother reading what you wrote, don’t make it public!
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14 comments ↓
Wow Sassy Cassie!
I like your direct writing style.
But going straight at the issue it cuts the verbiage down significantly. They way you write – I don’t have to wade through a whole bunch of waste of time modifiers to find the point.
Good luck to you on your writing – you’ve got spunk!
Rick Butts
You are SO right! What can we do about this?
@Dave L – Well I generally try to stay away from Yahoo Answers, but if we see some crappy suggestions I think one of the things we can do is chime in and offer some real advice (or direct them to a reputable and trusted source) to make sure the idiotic responses are not acted upon.
Did you know that this is the site that you get if you put “Yahoo Answers” “haven of morons” into google?
Some sections of it are worse than others, but yeah, it’s a haven of morons. I also think the average age there is about 15. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
Jane – I’m sure the average age is 15 or less, although I think it depends on which category you’re looking at. Regardless, it really is “haven of morons”. I love that phrase
I found this googling “Yahoo answers” “morons”, didn’t even need the “haven of”
Yahoo Answers is terrible. I see people confidently giving the wrong answer to simple questions of fact (e.g., somebody asks where an event takes place, and the answerers give two incorrect states). Even worse, people respond to questions with “I don’t know”. If you don’t know the answer, why did you bother responding? Yeah, I realize they probably get some utterly useless points for their useless answer.
Hi, yeah, i found this site by googling ‘yahoo answer is full of shit’ forgive my french. And in general it is, it helps doing amateur research but not for hard facts. haven of morons sounds better than f.o.s…
“Full of shit” is putting it mildly.
I remember telling some mother to feed her baby water and milk instead of gatorade, and mountain dew.
That mothering advice is most certainly misguided and borderline abusive. The “how to make money online” advice makes me cringe, too.
It’s the dumb leading the dumber.
I do love Yahoo Answers for getting link love to my sites, but I hope I’m not one of the morons adding to the crap.
However, I certainly wouldn’t ever encourage someone to go there for advice as I think it’s mostly high school kids bored and messing with people. Kind of like how I used to call and order free samples of Depends to be sent to my ex-boyfriends when I was bored.
You GO girl! Love your style.
Nicole Dean´s last blog ..Gag me with a Guru
Depends to the ex…now there is something I have yet to try. Thanks for the awesome idea! You rock
I gave up on Yahoo Answers -as a source for anything but a potential disgusting teeth whitening ad, spot welded to the worst possible answer to any given question- long ago.
This is the only website I’ve seen with a very real example of a “best answer” being:
“I have no idea.”
I’ve seen people give the answer “I don’t know or care”.
‘Place is a dump. I think you have to be a complete idiot to post there.
lol people on yahoo answers aren’t messing with others they are genuinely stupid. Haven’t you ever seen the yahoo answers question “how i make a mirror as desktop background scanning one doesn’t work”.
plus way to spoil your kids i went from a bottle straight to glass cups as soon as my arm was able to pick them up.
I agree completely.
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