Too much clutter in the answers...

This is certainly not a new observation and this may even have been discussed in the past. I find that questions generate way too many answers, certainly more than necessary. There's obviously not much you can do about poor or repetitive answers, the voting and accepting process should handle this.

My primary concern is with all of the "I have this problem too" answers. The website even encourages people to click a button that says this, which I believe further encourages them to restate it as an answer and then seek help. The Answers Forum is not your regular (threaded) discussion forum (which usually focusses on total contributions as rep), it is a Q&A forum which is driven by a points reward system based on unique questions. That means that if a user asks a "I have this problem too" question within an existing question 6 months later, they will likely never receive an answer because there is nor rep to be gained by the contributors. Some older question can have dozens of these.

My secondary concern is OP's "answering" their own questions or using new answers to comment on existing answers. It drives me nuts but more importantly, it makes the flow of information very hard to follow, even in the here and now. I can't imagine how you can follow a troubleshooting discussion in the future when everything is out of sync and cluttered with useless answers and me-to questions.

I 'd like to see if others feel the same way. Maybe we can come up with some good solutions.