how is babby formed —

The one Yahoo meme that perfectly represents the faltering company

As the company shambles to an end, let us celebrate its greatest terrible moment.

The one Yahoo meme that perfectly represents the faltering company

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."
An excerpt from Johnny's post about Yahoo Answers on the Something Awful forums. This was the moment when the babby meme was born.
Enlarge / An excerpt from Johnny's post about Yahoo Answers on the Something Awful forums. This was the moment when the babby meme was born.

For months, the question was largely ignored until a member of the Something Awful forums named Johnny "Doc Evil" Titanium mocked it mercilessly in a post called "Yahoo Answers Revisited." (Johnny is now known to Twitter as @fart.) Johnny placed kavya's question alongside another Yahoo Answers entry whose babby-related query was even more incoherent and not even a proper question: "they need to do way instain mother> who kill their babbys."

The babby questions were such a perfect encapsulation of the horror and sadness to be found on Yahoo Answers that the meme instantly went viral, spawning a hilarious video where cartoon cavemen read both in droning voices, complete with phonetic re-creations of the weird spelling. Soon, everyone was asking each other, "how is babby formed?" The proper response, of course, was: "they need to do way instain mother> who kill their babbys." What mattered wasn't what the words might have meant, but what they implied about the Yahoosphere. Kavya's naive, ill-formed question, asked on a neglected platform and answered by no one but trolls, seemed like some kind of commentary on Yahoo itself.

How is babby formed?

For all its accomplishments, Yahoo is perhaps most famous for destroying all of its best social properties. From its hideous deformations of Flickr and neglect of Upcoming to its starvation of Delicious and torment of GeoCities users, the company excelled at buying great things and turning them into unusable parodies of themselves. Execs seemed to profoundly misunderstand why people used the sites they bought. As the original community members drained away, they were inevitably replaced by people like kavya, whose babby-style contributions were nightmarish amalgams of griefing and cluelessness.

Things only got worse under CEO Marissa Mayer, a well-respected Google exec brought in to save the self-destructive company. Between 2012 and 2014, she killed 30 out of the 40 companies she acquired and pitched weird ideas like re-creating Yahoo's old homepage model for mobile. Under her leadership, the company also designed a custom tool for searching user e-mails at the behest of US intelligence—a move that led then-Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos to quit. Earlier this year, Mayer admitted that another state actor had also breached Yahoo's databases, exposing over a billion people's personal information.

Things had gone from joke to tragedy. Yahoo wasn't just annoying people; it developed tools to make complying with government wiretap orders easier and left its users vulnerable to malicious hackers. After the events of the past year, it's hard not to imagine Yahoo executives in meetings, asking in a panic, "How is babby formed?" I'm sure Mayer reassured them that "they need to do way instain mother>".

Other failed and failing companies have their own versions of the babby meme. We might say MySpace's defining moment was its ill-fated "scene queens," and Twitter will go down in history as the paranoia-inducing soapbox for President Trump. SecondLife was eventually defined entirely by its islands of furries and Gorians, and Friendster... well, Friendster may have died without ever having a defining moment. But the fact is that none of these companies ever spawned a self-actualizing meme that can compete with Yahoo's babby.

Once the Verizon merger has gone through, what remains of Yahoo's assets will be renamed Altaba, and its community will probably be left even more adrift. It seems a fitting end for a company that trashed so many vibrant online social spaces, turning what remained of their users into targets for various state-sponsored operations. Farewell, Yahoo. To quote one of your most devoted users, "I am truley sorry for your lots."

Channel Ars Technica