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> a) answers are clearly demarcated vs comments

About that, there seems to be a recent trend that answer quality is so low that the only actual useful information is on the comments.

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I have the exact opposite experience. In my experience the quality of answers has been improving significantly recently.

I believe that you can't be down-voted, and therefore lose your hard-won points, by commenting. But if you answer, you can be down-voted. So for some participants, commenting is prudent.

And then there are the poor souls who have a useful comment to make, but can't because you need reputation points to make comments. So they leave an answer instead, which is completely inappropriate and just leads to more discouragement.

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