This is 100% status-bydesign. In fact, it's a core part of how Stack Exchange works.
The sort of questions you're seeing are what we call "canonical answers." It's an effort to build a knowledge base of information that's likely to be useful for many different people.
Self-answering is encouraged. If you figure out something cool that other people might benefit from, you should write up a self-answer blog-type post.
If you take a look at the FAQ and About pages, you'll see this highlighted there, too.
This part's the blog part http://sstatic.net/superuser/img/venn-diagram.png
On Super User, we've taken this to the next level with community-faq questions. We specifically encourage users to write questions and answers to address common problems. We don't want 15 different "halp i got a virus what i do?" questions. We want a single starting point that's a good reference for what to do if you get a virus. We don't need 20 "can i do this with my win7 license?" questions. We want a single good overview of all the licensing options.
