So, according to research, Yahoo! Answers isn't really a serious site?

*

Sarcasm isn't your forte, and the site was designed with the focus of "the exchange of opinions and sharing of common experiences and advice." Further, " it is not based on the ambition to provide objective, verifiable information. Rather, its goal is to encourage participation from a wide variety of contributors. " So yes, you can find serious questions and accurate answers to them, but you can also find a lot of opinion, conjecture, and outright wrong information. It's up to the user who posted the question to verify any answer they're given, if accuracy is important to them. This is a community of mixed members, not a community of solely subject matter experts (although some few here are just that).

Jerry

A public Q&A forum is PUBLIC, is crowd sourcing for ideas. Naturally not every idea is a good one. But bad ideas are better than no ideas. Even a "bad" answer can give readers something new to think about, can be the "seed" that makes a good idea grow. I don't think it's valid to apply the standards of peer review scientific journals or even the standards of a responsible newspaper to something as free form as a public Q&A forum.

Ackiller J

The journalist is so right and he must have been an active user here.

Barry

One journalist means bugger all.

CarolOklaNola

No. It means YA exists mainly because businesses paid Yahoo and now Verizon for advertising space on YA. Yahoo provides free email. I had my first Yahoo email account in 1995, years before YA existed. Yahoo was s publicly owned business organization. The stockholders and investors revolted in 3014,, because thy had been losing money for more than 15 years. Yahoo went put of business in 2014 and put itself up for sale. Verizon is also publicly owned. I am a very minor Verizon stockholder.