Why did yahoo answers take away the ability to delete questions?

Users started complaining that they were spending time answering questions, just to have askers delete the question five minutes later. Especially with technical questions that took research to answer, this was becoming a problem. It also created an atmosphere where people started thinking first about asking.

Since you can not delete, just change the asker to anonymous and only you will know it is you. Also, since old, Bing and Google have long cached the items, so they would not go away, even if you deleted them.

They didn't take it away. You can delete a question up to the point it gets an answer. After that it has information on it that isn't yours, and if you were allowed to remove it, you would also remove the answer.

It's explained on the help pages.

You can delete a question by using the delete "X" to the right of the edit pencil icon (or the blue "Edit" box on the newer version) up to the point that there is an answer to the question.

As per the help pages:

Changes to your question or answer

After posting an answer, feel free to edit or delete it up until the Asker chooses a Best Answer. A question can only be deleted before it receives its first answer.

https://help.yahoo.com/kb/answers/question-answer-...

You can still delete question but only if they have not received any answers. If you are embarrassed by your questions, maybe you should not have asked them in the first place. You can also use the Anonymous feature so no one will know it was you who asked the question.

Click the Edit button under your question

Click Make Anonymous

You must manually click each question and do this.

Hope this helps!

No one but Yahoo knows but there are many users who abuse the delete feature. They would ask troll type questions some pretty disgusting then delete it hours later so they wouldn't get a penalty.