Simple enough question.
In answer to your question, I believe it is because so many people are first-and-only-time users who don’t know, don’t care about the guidelines. Look at the reputation level on them. Generally ‘1’
And yes, this is a forum topic, not a dev question. Therefore it should be closed IMHO but some may want to retag it as ‘meta’ or delete it completely.
The reason is simple: nobody tell them what to do. They think UA is like the forums, and use the answer to reply to answers and comments.
I think the best way to avoid this eternal confusion is to show a warning when somebody tries to use Answer in its own question - something like:
“You’re about to answer your own question! Are you sure? If you want to post a reply or comment, use add new comment instead.”.
I’m sure that this (together with a big and flashing add new comment button) could do the job. It would save us a lot of time telling to the newbies please, don’t use the answer box to reply, or other less polited things - not to mention the huge confusion these badly used answers create (sometimes we don’t even know to which answer add the “don’t use answers to reply” comment).
Another thing that should be improved is the code formatting button: most newcomers don’t even know it exists, and even those who know often don’t are able to get the desired results (we know that just selecting code and clicking this button doesn’t work all the times…). Maybe a warning message in that top orange strip could tell the newbie something like “Select your code and click 101-010 to format” (but the button must be working without bugs).
NOTE: By the way, I don’t even use this button anymore: I add a blank line, the < pre > tag, the code and the closing < /pre > tag. It works fine for me, but if anyone has a smarter way to do it, please share with us!
You can’t solve UI design problems by adding warnings and detailed instructions everywhere. Read “The Design of Everyday Things”, and you’ll learn that writing “push” and “pull” on door handles is a failure of designing the handle shape.
The biggest problem here is that the page looks like a forum page. When there are already answers, it prompts “Your Answer”, which in English means exactly the same as “Your Reply”. In addition, adding comments is hidden behind a button, whereas adding an answer is direct. It’s hardly surprising the result.
So the answer is: Bad UI Design.
Blaming users for misunderstanding a UI is always wrong. As game designers, we should all know this already.
to navigate the web effectively you have to learn to ignore about 70 percent of the information on a page as being a distraction “my avatar, my adverts, my real estate, my community signup preview option, etc” and try and look for just the buttons that are relevant to your use of the page.
this question and answer system works differently from all the other forums on the net, so if you have used 20 000 other forums before, and this comes up looking like a unity forum, you will use it the same as the 20 000 other forums on the net, there is no big warning page after signing in with big letters to explain the COMMENTS system, you learn that by getting nasty bad karma when you try to use this place normally.
I have high contrast letters so i didnt even see the formatting for the comment button and comment text.
i just dont know why people do baffles me why people write stuff in the wrong places