Yahoo Answers holds the potential to encompass every use case for StackOverflow and all your offshoots. However, I sincerely believe that the added context that a site like StackOverflow provides (being that it's curated specifically toward programmers) does provide real value. That sort of context injection could certainly be carried over to other verticals (provided the sites can attract seed contributors and curators).
The trick is finding a niche that you're interested in, can serve well with the site's format, and has money.
If you find that niche and you approach it in a novel way, then you can (likely) serve it infinitely better than a general questions and answers site like mahalo/yahoo answers.
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as a site? sure.
as a business? hard to tell.
Yahoo Answers holds the potential to encompass every use case for StackOverflow and all your offshoots. However, I sincerely believe that the added context that a site like StackOverflow provides (being that it's curated specifically toward programmers) does provide real value. That sort of context injection could certainly be carried over to other verticals (provided the sites can attract seed contributors and curators).
I agree, but monetization's always difficult.
The trick is finding a niche that you're interested in, can serve well with the site's format, and has money.
If you find that niche and you approach it in a novel way, then you can (likely) serve it infinitely better than a general questions and answers site like mahalo/yahoo answers.