How is Yahoo Answers different from Facebook, Twitter and other social sites?

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While the rating and following do make it appear more like social networking, the foundation of the site is essentially different. The "following" is not necessarily to maintain social contact, nor is the rating saying one likes or dislikes a person. Following may be done to more easily find and answer questions by a particular person, or check out their answers to see what one can learn from them. The thumbs up rating is meant to indicate that one agrees with an answer or believes the answer to be essentially correct; the thumbs down is meant to indicate that an answer is incorrect, inappropriate or otherwise not good. While some users do thumbs down simply because they disagree or don't like the response, that is NOT the intent of it.

The other fundamental difference of the site is that the rules are fairly strict and they govern the actual content posted in questions and answers. That content is intended to be useful, with the intent to gain knowledge or information that others can also find use from. Therefore, silly chatting questions like you find on twitter, ask.fm or other sites like that - have no place here.

Personally, I think YA took a step in the wrong direction by giving in to the pressure to make the site more social, but that is what the advertisers are looking for, so I understand the reasoning behind it.