I only use the Forum, but it seems to me that Answers only accomplishes the same thing but in Stack Overflow format. Why have both, and why have a seperate account for each? Thanks! Just wondering. 
You can have a linked account across both platforms. Answers is more for direct, answerable questions, while the forum is better for more long drawn out talks and more complex problems usually.
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Thanks for the information! For now I’ll stick to the forum since that is what I’m used to. 
I have bad memories of Stack Overflow… 
Don’t worry, your questions wont get instantly reported as duplicate on unity answers, even if it was asked before
On the down side you’ll have to wait a while before the question is approved and answered.
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Phew! That’s good news. 
It seemed like practically every question was already asked on Stack Overflow, and people gave downvotes to things all the time if they were asked already.
Which is really the way it should be. Having the best answer in one place makes things easier and better for everybody; that’s the whole point of having that format in the first place! It’s not supposed to be a forum, or anything like one. Honestly, I think Answers should be shut down, unless they’re willing to put time into running it properly. It was pretty good in the beginning, but it’s just a mess now.
–Eric
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True. Although I do agree the Stack Overflow does a wonderful job of being a guide and shuts down irrelevant questions quickly, sometimes it is very hard to find a corresponding answer to your question; and when you get downvoted for being a duplicate it isn’t completely fair.
But then the issue shifts and morphs slightly over time with answers never updated to reflect present options. Just the idea that the same question could have different answers as time goes on breaks the point of SO.
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Exactly why I prefer the Forum.
You can write more than one answer to a question. So if the answer changes, you just unaccept an old out of date answer, and accept a new one. I certainly did that with Answers in the past.
–Eric
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Answers is more like Quora - straight solutions (or kind of) to common issues and less conversation. Forum also serves this purpose although it’s more open-ended and more effective for learning & discussing new or beta features.
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I’m not sure why there are both, either. I’ve certainly found some cool information in answers, but there’s no reason I couldn’t have found it here.
Plenty of questions are answered straight here, too, without a long discussion.
On a side note (sort of), answers doesn’t look nearly as nice.
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I’ve had a few really helpful answers on the answers site before… some I’ve written the question myself, and just tons where somebody else had the same problem and had already been answered (a lot of times, by the person who had the problem to begin with 
).
I say, long live UA!
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I’m not sure about that. I’ve had cases where my question was marked as duplicate of a question that I found earlier and concluded it’s not the same. I’m guessing the users that reported it simply found the other question on google and saw that it had similar wording and thus assumed it was a duplicate.
So my suggestion would be to, instead of marking a question as duplicate, simply leave a link to the other question in the comments and let the user “close” the question on his own.
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Stack Overflow… I’ve stopped clicking any google search results that lead there. Almost invariably the answer will have been shut down mid discussion as a dupe, no link to what it was a dupe of, and no concern that Google searches pretty much only show the dupe topics on the first page since they are newer content.
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True, although sometimes (and in my experience) often duplicate questions do have a helpful answer, or at least a redirect to a helpful answer. I have nothing against Stack Overflow in terms of it being a resource, but actively using it as a forum/answers site to post questions and answers is quite difficult, if not impossible. Almost all asked questions are duplicates, which makes answering them worthless. In addition to the fact that people delete their comments all the time, commenting is not favored and requires a large amount of reputation, having a drawn out discussion on a topic is nearly impossible. Cheers to the Unity Forum!
Standard day of a StackOverflow elitist:
-See question.
-Alter it to fit your elitist terminology.
-Also remove any trace of politeness and interest in the process and basically change to question to “tell me how to do x”
-Mark the said question duplicate because it looks vaguely like a question in search results, even though newbies won’t find the connection/use the terminology to find the first question.
-Self felate as you wait for moderator to lock the thread.
https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d
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There is no difference between the two, you get replies from neither.
Someone is bitter. Did we not hold your hand enough?
They just posted in a section with very little activity. I’ve linked to the thread below.