Is SO doing something to discourage answering questions outright?
The community can be fairly tough on people who are wrong or missing part of the answer. People who aren't extremely experienced sometimes feel scared that their answer may not be the best for whatever reason and feel a lot of heat. This is also true for "stupid" questions. If you ask a bad question on SO you can feel the heat as well.
Here's an example. I posted this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/32051503/upgrader-process... .
Got the comment and it's solves my problem. Days later I got write a detailed response and answer my own question.
You give them the check and up-vote and you can always elaborate on their answer.
This is annoying for people answering the questions too: what should I do when I know the answer but it's already in the comments? Duplicate and rake the points for it? Leave it be and leave the question as unanswered?
"No reputation of any kind is earned or lost from comment votes, though the Commentator badge is awarded for leaving 10 comments, and the Pundit badge is awarded to those who left 10 comments, each with a score of 5 or more."Comments are safer, since you won't wind up with -3 and a bunch of comments about some irrelevant detail (like coding style). Comments cannot even be downvoted and most people won't flag them unless they're legitimately abusive/trolling.
The goal is to help people, and nobody is going to beat Jon Skeet anyway.
For example I would leave the comment "Have you tried some_method()?" if I think that might solve the problem if it hasn't been tried and it's not immediately clear if it has been tried or not. If it works I'll post it as answer if it doesn't I'll use that info to further debug.
There are also times I leave the answer as a comment when I shouldn't. If it's a dupe or I'm going to close it based on it being a typo or missing closing bracket or some other on sense typo. I'll point out their mistake and vote to close.