Why did Yahoo strip many features out of Answers?

Yahoo wanted the site to be more like Facebook (note that the two sites now have almost identical page layouts). Removing community voting for best answer may have stopped some point gaming, but it really does suck to give a well thought-out answer and just get a comment like "Thanks!" with no best answer chosen. My best answer percentage has dropped from 88% to 71% since the changes. People just take what they want and don't bother to choose a best answer. I also used to see some rather good mathematics questions on here. Now they are very rare. I guess they don't really teach math in school anymore.

Yahoo! stripped many features when they wanted to what they felt was to improve the site, even if it was not actually improved. Good luck on askville. Perhaps post an update here on how that is going.

Its left heaps of questions unresolved because the asker doesn't pick a best answer and no one can vote to help it get resolved.

Since many were voting for own answer with multiple accounts Yahoo stopped that option.

The move to remove voting was done for several reasons. Some people abused the voting to falsely increase their BA% and points, for example. Also, it meant that millions - literally - of questions were locked into a "dead" area with little to no activity. By releasing all those questions out of voting, by making us able to answer formerly "resolved" questions, Yahoo was able to make a SINGLE stream of questions, more easily handled, with fewer variables to track status on. Cleaner code, and a larger database is the result. The larger database was likely the biggest goal, as that is what attracts advertisers, and that is what the site is really aiming for - more ads.

When Saved Searches is working right, you should be able to customize searches to help you find older, unanswered questions.

As to your declining BA% - since it means nothing, the decline of it doesn't matter either. If you are doing your best to give good, useful answers here, that's all that should matter.

yahoo has ruined yahoo answers for unknown reasons. my thought is because to stop people communicating with each other.