The same.

I used to try and put forth some genuinely helpful answers, and also made some good connections from it.

For the Groups, unless they are heavily moderated by the Group owner they devolve quickly into total crap. People either post pointless spammy press releases, links to lame blogs, or respond to questions for help with a problem with horrible product suggestions.

Was it popular? I had never heard of Linkedin Answers before today, what was it exactly? Something like stack overflow?

Yes it was popular... The majority of business owners are not techie. They probably do not know about StackOverflow. So answering questions asked by business owners on Linkedin was a great way to make an impression. The biggest problem with with linkedin it that it's just overrun with requiters and social media experts. It's not professional anymore.

Answers evolved from a Q/A section to a just another portal for a social media expert to just refer to someone in their network. It was really annoying... The shutting down of Answers should be a warning to anyone that is trying to build credibility on a network, it can close at anytime and all your answers/reputation is gone

Me neither, never heard of Answers before!

As someone who has not used Answers, could you explain a bit more about what (if anything) differentiated it from Quora or StackExchange?

There was nothing special about it... just a simple Q/A site. The concept was to get points for answering questions and those points made you look better to potential business partners. Quora and SE, are websites built around Q/A... Those are products... this was just a feature of linkedin