‘How is prangent formed’: As Yahoo Answers shuts down today, watch the classic viral video that presaged its demise

Yahoo Answers is, not tragically, shutting down today. Yahoo announced on April 12 that it would be killing off its 15-year-old crowdsourced Q&A service, and it stopped accepting new questions as of April 20. A contributing cause of Yahoo Answers’ drawn-out death—other than its own awfulness—was surely a viral video titled “how is prangent formed” (below) that was uploaded to the YouTube channel of a gentleman who calls himself J.T. Sexkik on Oct. 20, 2016. It consists of nothing but screenshots of actual questions posted on Yahoo Answers, along with a (mostly) deadpan reading of those queries by Mr. Sexkik, who endeavors to faithfully pronounce all the various botched spellings of “pregnant.” Over the years the video racked up more than 40 million views. In the process, it helped make widely known—to those who didn’t already know—how useless and neglected (and therefore doomed) Yahoo’s Q&A platform had become (the answers were often as hilariously clueless as the questions). We should note that J.T. Sexkik’s comedic revelation built on the important work of, among others, YouTube user Chris Bixby, whose video “How is babby formed?” (also below), which takes its title from yet another actual Yahoo Answers question about human reproduction, was uploaded on June 29, 2008, and has nearly 2 million views. See also: “An Interview With the Man Behind Yahoo Answers’ Infamous ‘Am I Pragnent?’ Video,” from Slate. And: “Op-Ed: Yahoo! Answers is shutting down and taking a record of my teenage self with it,” from the Los Angeles Times.

‘How is prangent formed’: As Yahoo Answers shuts down today, watch the classic viral video that presaged its demise

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