(credit: Know Your Meme)
Now that Yahoo is on the verge of being eaten by Verizon, it’s hard to remember that the troubled company was once an innovative startup. But Yahoo rocketed to popularity after building the first directory for “homepages” on the 1990s information superhighway. Later, it became a giant of the Web 2.0 generation, partly by gobbling up the era’s best inventions, like Flickr. For a brief, improbable moment at the turn of the millennium, Yahoo was everyone’s one-stop shop on the Web for news, mail, photos, events, chat, and more.
But let’s not kid ourselves into framing Yahoo as some kind of proto-Facebook that came too soon or got unlucky. Yahoo’s defining moment had nothing to do with its accomplishments. When we look back on Yahoo knowing what we do today, it’s clear that Yahoo’s true self was revealed in a single, stark meme. I’m talking, of course, of the infamous Yahoo Answers query “how is babby formed?”
To understand this meme, we must go back to the distant days of 2006, when people occasionally read Yahoo Answers and Quora had not yet been born. Early that year, a person going by the name kavya posed the question “how is babby formed?” This person continued their entry by repeating the question, with an additional query: “how girl get pragnent.”
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