A grid of blue, balloon-like blobs are pinned against a checkerboard shooting range. The goal, says Aim Lab, is to pop all of the targets as fast as you can with a pistol that’s been tuned to the precise kinetic feedback of Riot’s wildly popular shooter Valorant. Whenever you connect with a target, another one will materialize somewhere else on the grid, meaning that players will be graded on a variety of different vectors including speed, efficiency, and precision. All of the gruesome flourishes we’ve come to expect in a modern FPS — the sanguine blood splatters, the ragdoll corpses, the frilly reload animations — are missing. Aim Lab is about raw, fundamental precision; the basic task of clicking targets on the screen reduced to its bedrock.

At the end of my first trial, I learned that my accuracy was hovering around a piddly, amateurish 50 percent. My most obvious weak spot? Apparently, I struggled landing shots to my right, and Aim Lab suggested clearing out any clutter on my desk that might be blocking my wrist. I moved some papers to the floor and booted up the module again, determined to get those numbers up.

Aim Lab, which was released into Early Access in 2017 and is free to play on Steam, is one of the many platforms attempting to solve a problem that’s vexed the video game community for generations. To excel at a shooter — particularly twitchy, tactical PC shooters like Counter-Strike and Valorant — you are expected to grind away in the matchmaking crucible, throwing up putrid KDAs, as you gradually grow more deft with your mouse. There is a lot of humiliation and disgrace baked into that process. But Aim Lab offers a kinder path toward Diamond-rank immortality. What if you could instead train in relative privacy and receive constructive feedback based on your own analytics? What if every one of your Rainbow Six Siege matches didn’t end with an early, inglorious death, forcing you to wait five minutes for another bite at the apple? What if your bad performances weren’t punctuated by a 12-year-old kid disparaging your personhood in the general chat?

It’s an enticing proposition. And that’s what has made Aim Lab, and other aim-training services, one of the true commercial forces in professional gaming, plastered across esports jerseys and Twitch broadcasts.

Earlier this year, Aim Lab brokered a sponsorship with Activision’s Call of Duty League, joining it with previously established deals with Riot Games and Ubisoft for Valorant and Rainbow Six Siege, respectively. The company has partnered with a number of high-profile Twitch streamers, like LuluLuvely and Ethos, as well as promoting full-fledged esports teams that use the service. (ScreaM, a Valorant player for Team Liquid, has proudly showcased his Aim Lab routine on his YouTube channel — his click fidelity is simultaneously inspiring and terrifying.)

Taken together, these sponsorships represent one of the core lines of demarcation that separates professional gaming and professional sports. It’s hard to imagine ever matching Giannis Antetokounmpo’s ability without freakishly long arms and a 40-inch vertical, and the NBA doesn’t want you to believe otherwise. (In fact, one of the most famous Nike ads of all time is about how you won’t be able to dunk after purchasing a pair of Jordans.) But to become as good as Ninja? That’s in sight, so long as you have the right tools. Aim Lab has been downloaded 25 million times, according to the company. And all of those people are hoping to finally, definitively, get good.

“Feedback that says, ‘You’re doing this right, you’re doing this wrong, here’s where there’s opportunities to improve,’ even without additional intervention, is something that people crave,” says Wayne Mackey, CEO and founder of Statespace, maker of Aim Lab. “That’s a key thing we’re trying to solve. To have a thumbprint of your performance. Knowing where you’re at, and where you’re at relative to other people, is one of things you don’t necessarily get from playing the game itself. In a game, all you really know is whether you hit someone or not.”

This is the premise that Aim Lab is built upon. For years, gaming superiority was an arcane art, known only within the limbic intuition of the top-level talent. But perhaps, with a fine brush, we can unlock what it takes to become a great player by scientifically drilling out the tics and bad habits we’ve accumulated in the same way a boxer might toil over their footwork. Mackey has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and he believes that first-person shooters — with their native pattern recognition and hand-eye coordination — are a rich text for anyone interested in the machinations of the human brain. Anyone who’s sat down in front of an FPS can identify that sublime rebirth when our combat reflexes meld with our muscle memory, and aim-training software looks to unearth that latent sixth sense hidden inside all of us. But shooters come in all shapes and sizes, which means that these bootcamps are adaptable to whatever deficiencies that apply to your gaming diet. 

“In Apex Legends there’s a longer time to kill, and that’s when tracking skills come into play,” says Garrett Krutilla, who designed KovaaK’s, another popular aim trainer on the market. (Tracking, in this context, refers to a player’s ability to keep their crosshairs on an enemy for an extended period of time.) “For games like Call of Duty and Counter-Strike, click-timing is much more important, because if you can shoot in just a split-second, the target dies.”

“A lot of pure Counter-Strike players come into an aim-trainer and do pretty well with the click-timing stuff, but then they’ll play a tracking simulator and be like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t do this,’” adds Krutilla. “They still have good aim, but they can’t track, because they haven’t developed skills quite yet.”

Personally, my white whale is Valorant. I’ve always been jealous of those who’ve mastered the subtle art of the positional shooter — who can squeeze out headshots at the very moment a smidge of flesh protrudes out of a distant corridor. I did not enter Aim Lab and KovaaK’s with the goal of reincarnating into an ace on the competitive ladder, but it would be nice to not suck. It’s an anxiety that’s becoming increasingly relevant as the video game industry tilts more towards a forever-online, multiplayer-heavy format. If I work hard enough, if I click on those balloons over and over again, maybe I won’t be left behind as I get deeper into my 30s.

It would likely take me months of discipline to confirm, without question, that the training has juiced my abilities. But after ramping up a few FPS sessions with a 30-minute dose of Aim Lab, I can conclude I don’t feel quite as useless as I did before. For total laymen, I think the coaching will help you feel less overwhelmed in the heat of a firefight. I am a thematic gamer at heart; I play Battlefield in order to immerse myself in World War II, rather than to crunch numbers and analyze damage thresholds. But after popping enough of those balloons, eventually those rivals on the other side of the map lose some of their eminent menace.

It’s remarkable how quickly Aim Lab can make your wrist glide across your desk on pure instincts, without any interference from your pesky brain. The training reminds you that, at the end of the day, FPSes are all rooted in muscle memory. Enemy players are transformed into static moving targets — just another thing to click on — rendering the competition a math problem rather than a first-person shooter. It turns out that there’s nothing to fear, so long as you feel prepared.

“If you can build up your confidence in what you’re doing, that will improve your skills and how much fun you’re having,” says Mackey. “And that’s why we’re training in the first place.”

Both Mackey and Krutilla struggled to sum up the average aim-training user. It’s a loose confederation of those who genuinely aspire towards lofty professional heights — a Twitch star, a league contract — and those who simply want to punish their friends with greater dominance. What is clear is that both of these companies are injecting a healthy dose of capital into the ephemeral, and occasionally flagging, esports industry. We mentioned Aim Lab’s sponsorships earlier, but KovaaK’s also has a deal with a variety of streamers, as well as the Overwatch League’s Houston Outlaws. They warm up in their nylon jerseys, popping those balloons, before laying waste to the field with a nuclear capacity that the average FPS addict can only dream of. “It’s very authentic with us,” says Krutilla. “We make sure the people we sponsor are using the software.”

Mackey goes a step further. To him, the aim-training business and the competitive gaming business are congenitally entwined, and every sponsorship deal he inks is helping seed a more prosperous future for esports. He has the money to spread around, so why not give it to the gamers themselves?

“I can’t imagine a better way to spend money that’s earmarked for marketing. I can support the community and the streamers that everyone loves watching, or I can give money to Facebook. It’s not even a question,” he says. “We have a real rising tide mentality. Whatever is good for the community, in turn, will help us in some way. It moves everyone forward.”

I hope this attitude takes hold as the esports boom enters its uncertain adolescent years. Much has been made of the competitive gaming bubble — how a lot of the initial shriek of investment cash in the industry was misplaced, as publishers faced the music on some bad bets. (Does Halo really need to have a professional league?) But maybe esports always possessed the ability to buoy itself without relying on specious, running-in-the-red VC finance. Who needs patronage from Visa, Amazon, and Apple when there’s a suite of companies built to serve the specific inclinations of the ascendent Twitch generation?

Aim Lab and KovaaK’s help gamers get better at first-person shooters, and both serve the community with natural fluency. As the bloat atrophies away, hopefully we’ll be left with an esports field that no longer feels grossly unsustainable. It’s high time to reorient this industry around those who want to be in this ecosystem for the long haul. In the meantime I’ll be at the range, grinding my way towards Silver. Hey, you gotta start somewhere.

When the video game industry is valued at $300 billion, a Halo TV series trailer is occupying prime real estate during the AFC Championship, and a GTA facsimile like Free Guy is one of the top-grossing films of the year, it is clear that Jack Thompson lost the fight. For those who don’t remember, Thompson was the attorney who led the charge against violent video games and helped morph a fringe topic into a dominant wedge issue of the mid-2000s. He has since vanished from the public eye as the outrage ran dry, and everyone moved on.

Looking back, the imagery of the zeitgeist — think Joe Lieberman brandishing a light-gun live on CSPAN or Hillary Clinton equating first-person shooters to tobacco and alcohol — is rendered strange and atemporal in the harsh light of the 2020s. Yes, the affair still earns some perfunctory attention, usually engineered by the NRA in response to yet another mass shooting, but I think everyone who was once involved in the gaming panic knows that the jig is up. Degenerate classics like Mortal Kombat, Doom, and Grand Theft Auto seep deeper into the marrow of our culture with each passing day with no real objection from the nation’s lawmakers. Hell, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, one of the young stars of the MAGA movement, is actively petitioning for American military technology to better resemble the arsenal in Halo. Where have all the true believers gone?

Thankfully, Jack Thompson was kind enough to answer his phone on a sunny Friday afternoon in South Florida. It only took a few minutes for him to unleash a salvo of takes, forever cocked and loaded for anyone willing to listen. He asserts an association between the rise of crime in New York City to Take-Two, the publisher behind Grand Theft Auto. After all, he explained, Take-Two is headquartered in Manhattan. Thompson is never going to betray his heart, for better or worse.

“Americans are famous for moving on,” he told me. “We have the attention span of a mosquito. Churchill said that when most people stumble across the truth, they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and move on as if nothing happened. What pissed people off about me is that I didn’t do that. I’m 70. I’m still here. I haven’t died yet.”

I believe I first became acquainted with Jack Thompson in an ancient issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly. I was 14 years old and proudly self-identifying as a gamer. To be fully ensconced within that community in the early 2000s, one was encouraged to hold a special hatred for a litigious attorney in Florida who had filed numerous grievances against the games industry. The cases were usually built around the specious premise of a depersonalizing psychological force that trained impressionable teenaged PlayStation owners to commit random acts of violence. In eighth grade, I did not possess any ethical grounding beyond one core thesis: those who wanted to take my video games away were the enemy. Thus, for a large portion of my youth, there was nobody I hated more than Jack Thompson.

The breadth of Thompson’s portfolio is impressive and almost impossible to recount in full. He’s a career moral agitator; before video games, he attempted to restrict the sale of 2 Live Crew albums, and he has a longstanding feud with Howard Stern. But Thompson’s life changed forever in 1999 when he filed his first gaming lawsuit, claiming that the perpetrator of the Heath High School shooting was desensitized by a collection of computer games. (MechWarrior, Resident Evil, and Redneck Rampage, to name a few.) That case didn’t go anywhere, but it put Thompson in a prime position to pounce on the burgeoning hysteria that would soon swallow up the then-forthcoming Grand Theft Auto III. Rockstar’s opus was gruesomely sculpted out of futuristic 128-bit tech and possessed an unapologetically nihilistic spirit. In an age where video games had not yet fully assimilated into mainstream society, the levy was destined to break.

“It made me sick to my stomach,” said Thompson when I asked about the first time he saw Grand Theft Auto up close. “I was in my house, I put [Grand Theft Auto III] in a video game console, and it was disturbing. You weren’t passively watching something; you were participating in it.”

By the middle of the decade, Jack Thompson had filed lawsuits targeting nearly every tendril of the video game supply chain. He sued Best Buy after claiming that his 10-year-old son purchased a copy of Grand Theft Auto Vice City from a store clerk. (Best Buy affirmed its existing policy to only sell M-rated games to those 17 or older.) He sued Take-Two on multiple occasions, usually in conjunction with some sort of homicide trial involving underaged gamers. (All were dismissed.) He became histrionic, almost revivalist, in his allegations, fashioning himself as a modern-day crusader.

Thompson once postulated that the DC sniper was a radicalized gamer, based on the fact that investigators found a Tarot card inscribed with the words “Call me god” at one of the crime scenes. (“You go to video game chat rooms, and you have the proclamation ‘I am God’ all over the place,” he said, on a 2002 episode of The Today Show.) After the release of Bully, a 2006 game set in a Northeast preparatory school, Thompson discovered that the male main character had the ability to kiss another boy. “We just found gay sexual content in Bully,” he wrote in a letter to the ESRB. “Good luck with your Teen rating now.” (The board responded, saying they were already aware of the scene when rating the game.)

Thompson’s relentlessness, charisma, and cosmic belief in his cause made him a fixture on the cable-news salon circuit. He has sat down with Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, and Rebecca Quick and was once prominently featured in an episode of 60 Minutes. The message boards I regulared were speckled with primordial Jack Thompson memes, casting the man as the singular existential threat to the hobby I loved. It feels strange to say this in our era of millionaire Twitch streamers and international esports leagues, but for a period of time, you could make the argument that Jack Thompson was legitimately the most famous person in video games. Over the phone, Thompson allows that maybe, some of that fame went to his head.

“I enjoyed being the center of attention. We’re all egocentric to a certain extent. To be on cable news, to do 60 Minutes, to be on Opera … it’s fun,” he said. “It’s a rocket ride. But eventually, you come back down to earth.”

Thompson was disbarred by the Florida Supreme Court in 2007 after being accused of 31 different lawyerly violations. The charges are bleak and include allegations like sending “hundreds of pages of vitriolic and disparaging missives, letters, faxes, and press releases,” and “publicly accusing a judge as being amenable to the ‘fixing’ of cases.’” Thompson has not practiced law since, and he still regards the disbarment as a devastating derailment of his video game activism. Does he admit guilt? Not really, though he does have some regrets. Thompson believes he was too angry when dealing with his adversaries, which encouraged them to play hardball with him in return. But overall, I get the sense that Thompson believes he is a martyr of his convictions. Nobody is ever going to convince him that he wasn’t in the right.

“The plan was to disbar me so I wouldn’t be relevant, and that by and large happened,” he says. “It was a terrible experience. … You can be a felon in Florida and get your law license, but you can’t be Jack Thompson and ever get it back. Even if I had an epiphany that everything I did was wrong, and that I was a scumbag, and that I’m sorry, that doesn’t result in any remedy.”

The irony is that Thompson’s wish is coming true. In many ways, he’s finally getting the congressional scrutiny over video games he’s always petitioned for — though not in the form he imagined. In 2019 the FTC held a workshop centered around loot boxes, the pernicious, habit-forming scheme designed to drip-feed randomly assorted new items into players’ inventories in the hopes that they’ll keep spending money for more. The World Health Organization concurred with those anxieties when it added video game addiction to its list of diseases that same year. For the first time in my life, there is a groundswell of momentum to ethically regulate the predatory economic practices of the games industry. Thompson and I both agree that publishers need to keep kids safe, but he has not abandoned his fundamental principle that a violent video game might entice troubled kids to commit violence themselves. That leaves him permanently out of step with mainstream cultural and scientific momentum. If only he knew the revolution was already upon us.

Thompson anticipates a reckoning. Someday, he says, the defense team in a murder trial is going to argue that their client was revved into a frenzy due to, in part, an inveterate video game habit. The jury will buy it, and the suspect will escape the death penalty. At last, all of Thompson’s warnings come home to roost, and the real villains — Tommy Vercetti, Niko Bellic, and Carl Johnson — will be unmasked for all to see. It’s hard for me to even conceptualize the scenario that Thompson describes, but I suppose that anyone still committed to dismantling Grand Theft Auto in 2022 must engage in some degree of magical thinking.

“It’s going to work, and that’s going to get people’s attention,” said Thompson. “People are going to freak out. They’re going to say, ‘Wait a minute, somebody can kill somebody and only be convicted of manslaughter by virtue of a video game defense?’ … [they’ll want to] do something about the games and their distribution.”

But until that day comes? Who knows. Thompson is considering writing another book but was slowed down two summers ago when he had a heart attack after teeing off on the first hole of a round of golf. “I had a 100 percent blockage in what’s called the Widowmaker artery,” he said. Thompson’s moral alignment has also evolved in realms outside of the video game business in some surprising ways. He’s a proud evangelical Christian and tells me he voted for Trump in 2016. “It became pretty clear that was a big mistake,” he said. Thompson re-registered as a Democrat in 2020 and voted for Joe Biden in the Florida primary. People can change, even Jack Thompson. “We’ve all been affected by Black Lives Matter and what happened in Minneapolis,” he said. “There’s no reason to trust the Republican party anymore about anything… I think they’ve completely screwed up by hitching their wagon to Trump.”

In fact, I think it is safe to say that Jack Thompson is at peace. He’s retired, he’s playing golf every day, and he only relitigates the culture war when a journalist calls him up on the phone. Thompson holds onto one longshot; maybe, someday, he’ll be reinstated to the Florida bar. “I don’t want anyone’s apology, but I have this hope, this unshakable idea. That’d be a nice thing,” he said toward the end of our conversation. Perhaps the last Grand Theft Auto crusader can pick up where he left off, and a brand new generation of gamers can hate his guts.

“I’ve got everything I need,” finishes Thompson. “Except more time.”

The camera-mounted Google truck that drove through South Africa’s Kruger National Park is equipped with a distinct, camo-green paint job and a pair of white racks resting on its rooftop. The car can’t be found anywhere else on Earth; so, if you pan down and see its blurry edges on Street View, you know that you’re somewhere within a 7,523 square mile radius north of Eswatini and west of Mozambique.

This is a completely useless piece of trivia for everyone except those who take the browser game GeoGuessr very, very seriously — and more people are joining those ranks every day. 

The game is simple. In each round, a player is dropped at a random location on Google Street View’s wide, interlocking atlas, potentially anywhere across the globe. Using only the context clues gleaned from the surrounding fauna, climate, billboards, and language, players are challenged to identify their coordinates on a map as accurately as they can and, in certain competitive settings, as fast as they can. So, at the highest levels of cutthroat metagaming ambition, the contours of the Kruger National Park’s truck becomes vital information — a way to separate the pros from the hobbyists.

“You might not see that car again for two years playing the game,” says RadoX1988, one of the moderators of GeoGuessr’s competitive subreddit, who asks to be referred to by his online pseudonym. “But if you can remember it, over a long period of time, that becomes a massive advantage.”

GeoGuessr was never designed to be played at high stakes. The game arrived in 2013 as a freeware project authored by a Swedish IT professional named Anton Wallén, right as Google was working to fill in the gaps to worldwide camera coverage. (“Was fiddling around with backbone and Google maps API v3 and decided to make a small application. Would appreciate your feedback/suggestions?” wrote Wallén on an ancient Reddit thread unveiling GeoGuessr’s original incarnation.) It became one of those enduring social media curios — something you showed your mom on winter break. The idea that anyone would grind away at Wallén’s invention in the same way that top World of Warcraft guilds plowed through raid bosses was totally ludicrous. 

And yet, scores of subscribers now log on YouTube to watch GeoGuessr semi-pros like Tom Davies, aka GeoWizard, who’ve trained long and hard to become oracular, all-seeing masters of Google Street View. It’s incredible to watch him cook. Davies plops into a bustling flea market, pans the camera around, and sees the abbreviation “KSI” on a banner. “Does that stand for Kumasi?” a city in central Ghana. He pins down his location with omnipotent precision. (“2.2 miles away, fair enough,” he says.) A few minutes later, Davies touches down on a tranquil river and investigates a few highway signs bearing some telltale script: “I think this is Montenegro.” He comes within five yards of an exact match. 

Davies is the harbinger of one of the most unexpected trends in gaming. In 2021, more than 240,000 people follow the GeoGuessr tag on Twitch, and a casual competition in late October, hosted by the French player AntoineDaniel, earned over 100,000 views. At a time when the future of the esports industry is in flux — with economists warning of market corrections and high-profile leagues teetering on the brink — plenty of young players discovered that nothing in video games rivals the drama of scouring a map as the timer ticks down, unsure if you’re in either Vietnam or Cambodia.  

RadoX1988 isn’t sure how all of this happened. When he started participating in the GeoGuessr subreddit in 2017, there were only about 10 users actively competing. “We all just played the daily challenge together, and that was it,” he says. Participation grew slowly through the end of 2020, when suddenly, a huge swathe of fresh blood poured into the community, eager to showcase their topographic aptitude. RadoX1988 speculates that a zeitgeist circled around GeoGuessr’s newly launched “Battle Royale” mode — translating the anxious, one-vs-all bedlam of Fortnite into the sedate act of map-pointing — which hit live servers last winter. “That made GeoGuessr mainstream for the first time,” he says.

Filip Antell, head of communications at GeoGuessr, says he welcomes the newly energized cast of pin-droppers tearing up the game. The team released a “Pro Leagues” function, where players can create their own round-robin competitions among invitees. They’ve also put together a “Career Mode” with daily challenges and experience points, which evokes the enveloping progression systems you might find in League of Legends and Counter-Strike, nudging GeoGuessr closer to esports terrain. “When you look at the pro players that can be dropped anywhere in the world and actually find out where they are based on the road, the sun, the environment, it’s really jaw-dropping,” says Antell. “And I believe that when you see someone being able to differentiate and excel in that, it also encourages you to do the same.”

There’s no centralized competitive infrastructure in GeoGuessr — nobody battles in this game while swaddled in plush, nylon FaZe Clan jerseys — so those invested in the art of atlas combat must create their own rivals. Anyone can host a tournament, and they come in all sorts of different flavors. There’s an ongoing Reddit League, complete with a stringent regular season that ranks players on their win/loss records before eventually crowning a winner and relegating the bottom-feeders. Each week, the Street View action goes down in a distinct region (Germany, Guatemala, Saskatchewan), accentuating the versatility necessary for longitudinal superiority. “You have to be serious about it and play on the regular,” says RadoX1988. There is also a “World Cup” challenge, in which players compete head to head in “home” and “away” games. The first match takes place in one player’s chosen country, the second in the other’s backyard, like a summer series between the Yankees and Red Sox.

That said, there are rarely any prizes on the line in high-level GeoGuessr play. Zotomo, a tournament organizer in Japan, tells me champions will occasionally receive a small trophy or a GeoGuessr Prime subscription — which guarantees an unlimited number of free games on the platform. But for the most part, the only reward is bragging rights. This is the nature of the beast. GeoGuessr is a free browser game with no security safeguards or automated pit bosses, explains Zotomo. That makes it easy for someone to open a surreptitious tab and Google the name of whatever street they happen to land on, totally derailing the spirit of sportsmanship. “It is very hard for organizers to be able to prevent cheating,” says Zotomo. “So no serious prizes can be given away without a lot of issues.”

It’s the elephant in the room and perhaps the only barrier facing GeoGuessr as it continues to stretch its legs as a nascent esport. Wallén developed this game on the back of data scraped directly from Google, and as such, GeoGuessr headquarters will never be fully in control of its servers. Does that rule out a timeline full of LAN events, cash prizes, and all the pageantry we associate with the modern esports industry? Not necessarily. “Having an official GeoGuessr Masters would be really interesting to set up in the future,” says Antell. “If one can dream.” 

I understand his optimism. The GeoGuessr team has already beaten the odds by proving that a geography game can exist in the same competitive atmosphere as Call of Duty. Scores of players are pouring in, all of whom are eager to demonstrate how quickly they can identify the trucks of Kruger National Park. With just the sun, the mountains, and a handful of road signs, the sky’s the limit.

“Who do you blame for Yahoo Answers getting shut down?” reads one of the final queries ever submitted to the venerable advice service. As of press time, it has garnered more than 250 responses, all from those who’ve regularly doled out their imperfect observations to countless eighth-graders, chronic hypochondriacs, political firebrands, and curious stoners throughout the 15-year life span of the site.

The premise of Yahoo Answers was simple: ask any question you want and receive solutions from anyone in the world. “[It] likely doesn’t turn a profit … instead of spending the money necessary to moderate they just decided to close the whole thing down,” theorizies a user named Bill, who has penned 11,182 of these answers during his career on the forum. Elsewhere, veterans blame the liberals or the conservatives, or lay the fault at the feet of the parent company, Verizon. There is no right or wrong way to contend with the death of an internet giant, especially when the inevitable is on the horizon. On May 4th, Yahoo Answers will enter a permanent read-only mode and functionally cease to exist. We may never know how babby is formed.

It’s unclear why Yahoo Answers is being sunset now. The company isn’t terminating any of its other services. Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, and Yahoo Mail will all continue to exist. Yahoo simply said the product has become “less popular over the years” and suggested that it does not “deliver on Yahoo’s promise of providing premium trusted content.”

Forum habitués speculate that this execution is a result of the site’s glacial rhetorical shift toward psychedelic conspiracy and heated partisanship in recent years. Currently, the front page includes such burning inquiries like, “Will America survive 4 years of Joe Biden?” and “Will the summer be record riots by BLM and antifa?” In the thread where a user asks who is responsible for the site coming to an unceremonious end, someone replies: “left-wingers, they don’t want people to know the truth.” In that sense, maybe Bill’s postulation is right. Perhaps the powers that be at Yahoo simply grew tired of watching a public good mutate into yet another exhausting battlefront in the interminable American culture war and opted to cut their losses. 

That is the great tragedy of Yahoo Answers. Long before aggrieved reactionaries became barnacles to its abandoned underside in order to spout talking points imported directly from The Ingraham Angle, it existed as an extremely sincere, extremely harebrained epicenter of mindless juvenile interests. You can still see shadows of that former life, even now, if you look hard enough. “What does it feel like to be 50 years old?” writes one poster, a day before the announced shuttering. “I’m 17 I can’t even imagine what it must feel like to have been on planet Earth for that long.” The Yahoo Answers braintrust immediately mobilized to sate the thirst for knowledge. As usual, the results were scattershot in their saliency and applicability. “I am 61 and at that awkward age for men between 16 and 70,” answers an anonymous user, who has Phil beat with a whopping 18,066 total posts. “I can still misbehave!” 

That was the spirit of the site; dubious questions met with dubious answers, the end result of trusting the ravenous pursuit of knowledge to those who possess enough free time to spend their days offering unverifiable insight to anonymous patrons. So many of the classic Yahoo Answers threads are written in a distinct mangled keyboard patois that belongs to both elementary-aged children and hunt-and-pecking sexagenarians alike. In 2021, when it feels like everyone in our life is chronically online, there is a strange, wistful sublimity in paging through the archives. Yahoo Answers represents an era where social media wasn’t chronically poisoned with irony and restless posturing; when the denizens of the internet were a little less afraid of the dreaded self-own. I already mentioned “How Is Babby Formed,” but who could forget, “Will my laptop get heavier if I put more files on it?” or “What is the right age to start teaching my dog about sex?” It was the most earnest place on the internet. There are no dumb questions, only Yahoo Answers.

But unfortunately, nothing is safe from the great polarization of American society, where every scrap of digital terrain — from the subdivisions of 4Chan to your grandmother’s Facebook page — has been transformed into a focal point of perpetual political resentment. Not even Yahoo Answers, whose name implies a wholesome search for utilitarian, objective truth, was immune to the rising tide of boneheaded nationalism. It’s instructive, I think, to know that basic human courtesies, like posing and answering questions, have been irredeemably poisoned by the bad-faith instincts of the cursed, modern internet. There is simply no feasible way to subsist as a True Neutral web entity anymore. Yahoo Answers is just the latest casualty.