It seems to me that the way beginners are encouraged to start participating in these communities is purely by asking questions. I understand that you wouldn't want to give inexperienced people the ability to throw around poor answers and want us to build up credibility.

I'm not sure where you've gotten this impression; new (and even unregistered) users can post answers from the very beginning. Posting questions is probably easier, at least for most people, but you're more than welcome to post answers if you see a question you can be helpful on.

I wonder if there could not be another feature by which any member (who did not post the question) could communicate that a given answer was helpful to them or perhaps also solved the same problem for them. Like an "I found this helpful" button or something.

This should already exist. There's a link below the comments of a post labeled "feedback":

which displays a "Was this question helpful to you?" prompt:

This is referred to as "anonymous user feedback" all over meta, and that seems to be the primary source, but on our feedback summary page I can see a row for "registered feedback" with 10 entries this week, so I think this should be visible to you as well, until you hit the ability to upvote posts.

It seems to me that the way beginners are encouraged to start participating in these communities is purely by asking questions. I understand that you wouldn't want to give inexperienced people the ability to throw around poor answers and want us to build up credibility.

I'm not sure where you've gotten this impression; new (and even unregistered) users can post answers from the very beginning. Posting questions is probably easier, at least for most people, but you're more than welcome to post answers if you see a question you can be helpful on.

I wonder if there could not be another feature by which any member (who did not post the question) could communicate that a given answer was helpful to them or perhaps also solved the same problem for them. Like an "I found this helpful" button or something.

This should already exist. There's a link below the comments of a post labeled "feedback":

which displays a "Was this question helpful to you?" prompt:

This is referred to as "anonymous user feedback" all over meta, and that seems to be the primary source, but on our feedback summary page I can see a row for "registered feedback" with 10 entries this week, so I think this should be visible to you as well, until you hit the ability to upvote posts.

It seems to me that the way beginners are encouraged to start participating in these communities is purely by asking questions. I understand that you wouldn't want to give inexperienced people the ability to throw around poor answers and want us to build up credibility.

I'm not sure where you've gotten this impression; new (and even unregistered) users can post answers from the very beginning. Posting questions is probably easier, at least for most people, but you're more than welcome to post answers if you see a question you can be helpful on.

I wonder if there could not be another feature by which any member (who did not post the question) could communicate that a given answer was helpful to them or perhaps also solved the same problem for them. Like an "I found this helpful" button or something.

This should already exist. There's a link below the comments of a post labeled "feedback":

which displays a "Was this question helpful to you?" prompt:

This is referred to as "anonymous user feedback" all over meta, and that seems to be the primary source, but on our feedback summary page I can see a row for "registered feedback" with 10 entries this week, so I think this should be visible to you as well, until you hit the ability to upvote posts.

It seems to me that the way beginners are encouraged to start participating in these communities is purely by asking questions. I understand that you wouldn't want to give inexperienced people the ability to throw around poor answers and want us to build up credibility.

I'm not sure where you've gotten this impression; new (and even unregistered) users can post answers from the very beginning. Posting questions is probably easier, at least for most people, but you're more than welcome to post answers if you see a question you can be helpful on.

I wonder if there could not be another feature by which any member (who did not post the question) could communicate that a given answer was helpful to them or perhaps also solved the same problem for them. Like an "I found this helpful" button or something.

This should already exist. There's a link below the comments of a post labeled "feedback":

which displays a "Was this question helpful to you?" prompt:

This is referred to as "anonymous user feedback" all over meta, and that seems to be the primary source, but on our feedback summary page I can see a row for "registered feedback" with 10 entries this week, so I think this should be visible to you as well, until you hit the ability to upvote posts.