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I've found that if you go to Stackoverflow for a fast-moving topic like Javascript, the first answer isn't correct in modern terms. The next set of answers, wit

I've found that if you go to Stackoverflow for a fast-moving topic like Javascript, the first answer isn't correct in modern terms. The next set of answers, without check marks, are likely more correct. So you have to read the entire page to get a glimpse of the truth. This can be bad if you're just looking for an immediate solution, however for learning its fantastic because it shows you a recorded history of how things evolved over time in a framework.

hjnilsson 10y ago
I think the crusade against duplicates worsens this problem. If duplicates were more accepted, it would both make it more welcoming for newcomers to ask questions, and encourage people to update the answers to old questions (by answering the new questions).
- notyourwork 10y ago
  I'm not sure what the right answer is but I agree duplicate answers allow me to garner different perspectives or approaches to the same problem. This can be very helpful as you might be missing a simple parameter that makes the checked answer not correct in your situation.
- chipperyman573 10y ago
  I've found that if I acknowledge the duplicate (which is very easy considering when you post a new question it shows you similar posts) and state a reason it doesn't work any more (even if that is just, "has anything changed?") it rarely gets flagged as a dupe.
- x1798DE 10y ago
  I don't totally understand why people worry so much about your question being marked as a duplicate. Questions marked as duplicates are not deleted and still show up in search results - the reason why duplicates are still kept around after being marked is because they sorta want duplicate questions on the site, because every person is going to state their query in slightly different language, and you want people searching using different terms to end up in the same place. Most of the time if your question is mostly a duplicate but the other question (or its answer) is missing some critical factor, then you can appeal and say, "I don't think this is a duplicate of <x> because <y>" (or modify your question with the stipulation that the answer solve the critical factor) and the duplicate marking will be removed. The other thing is, even when questions get marked as duplicates or closed, half the time I still see them accumulating their own answers, so really, what's the big issue?
  - DanBC 10y ago
    If you ask a question and it genuinely has been answered elsewhere a friendly note "I think your question is answered here [url], is there anything that isn't answered by that question?" is useful. But "duplicate of [url]" often links to a question that has enough differences to not be a dupe. It's hostile, and it's a sign that incentives are out of alignment.
    - x1798DE 10y ago
      But just telling someone the answer might be available somewhere else doesn't direct future traffic to the canonical question, which is the entire point of the "marked as duplicate" flag. If your question gets marked as duplicate and the question it's a duplicate of is a different question, it is not very hard to get it "re-opened". Maybe people don't know that this is true, but I think the main people having problems with questions marked as duplicates are new users where you've had very little time to educate them about what it means to have your question marked as a duplicate (basically, not much). Even if you made the "marked as duplicate" flag less obtrusive or whatever, politely saying, "Your question may have an answer at <url>" probably will get interpreted as "RTFM", and called user-hostile as well. As an aside, my only experience with having a question marked as a duplicate happened on a sister SE site - it was my first post there, I asked a question, then after posting I found the answer in one of the "related questions" links on the sidebar. I answered my own question with a link to the other question and a description of the answer I found there, then flagged my own post as a duplicate. Both the question and answer were highly upvoted.
      - DanBC 10y ago
        > it is not very hard to get it "re-opened". I'd be interested to see some statistics. I strongly suspect that when most newbies are told to fuck off that they do, in fact, fuck off.
        x1798DE 10y ago
        I don't disagree with that assessment, per se, but I don't think much can be done about it. The message doesn't say, "Fuck off, you worthless loser", it says (taken from the site), "This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please edit this question to explain how it is different or ask a new question." The fact that you interpret this as "fuck off" more or less proves my point that anything hinting at, "Maybe the answer can be found here" will be interpreted by new users as "fuck off". As for statistics, you may be able to find some by querying the data explorer: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new I suspect it would be difficult to (automatically) distinguish between instances where a user was discouraged by the message and instances where the user's question was answered at the link. Perhaps the fraction of instances where the question was edited after being marked as a duplicate, then re-opened, is an OK metric for how willing a given community is to re-open questions.
martinald 10y ago
Agreed. I usually use 'site:stackoverflow.com [[query]]' in Google with search terms limiting pages that have been updated in the last year or so. Filters a lot of the very old answers out which often can send you on a totally wrong direction because the ecosystem has changed so much. Perhaps SO will end up getting overtaken by a new similar site, not because it is intrinsically better, just because they reset the corpus of answers so the SNR is higher for a while? I imagine SO will become increasingly less useful as their Q&A gets older and older.
- mhurron 10y ago
  > Perhaps SO will end up getting overtaken by a new similar site It will, and then in 5 or so years we'll be hearing the same complaints about that service. SO's problem is people, so unless you can come up with a service that removes them you're going to have the same issue.
- douche 10y ago
  This is really a much smaller problem if you stick to languages outside the churn'n'burn whizzbang web world. A lot of answers from the Java 1.6 era, or about .Net 3.5, or Python 2.7 are still largely relevant. Best practices in C/C++ have been even more static, aside from a few additions in recent modern standards that few seem to actually use.
  - rubber_duck 10y ago
    C# changed a decent amount since 3.5 to dotnet core, similar to python 2 to 3 which also changed a lot of stuff. And C++11 is practically a new backwards compatible language compared to legacy C++. Java is more stable but at the same time it's also the slowest to evolve which is why many developers prefer C# even if it wasn't cross platform in the past - the language was just superior because of how fast it is evolving, considering that at 1.0 they were basically equivalent.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mattmanser 10y ago
I think the accepted answer causes a lot of problems, I personally think that after 3-6 months it should no longer pin it as the top answer, votes should. Not sure if it's ever been discussed on meta, I don't understand why they haven't done it already, seems a reasonable solution.
- robin_reala 10y ago
  It has been discussed, and fairly recently: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326095/please-unpin-the-accepted-answer-from-the-top http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326095/please-unpin-...
- MasterScrat 10y ago
  I asked that once on Meta, my question got downvoted to an horrifying level (-17 or something) and I ended up deleting it. I learned afterward Meta downvote don't actually impact your rep but still.
notyourwork 10y ago
Its crazy that SO isn't able to spoon fed devs answers to their specific need based on solutions to other people's specific needs. If people would put it in these terms they would realize they should have to read a bit and have to earn their solution to their problem. Frankly, even if the most upvoted answer looks correct I still take the time to read all other answers, comments and perhaps a few other similarly related questions. Perhaps I am unique in this but I also find myself rarely relying on SO first and usually as a last ditch resort for odd scenarios. SO has consolidated a massive amount of information and is a great resource. People expect too much of words though and should have to do some work themselves.

hjnilsson 10y ago

I think the crusade against duplicates worsens this problem. If duplicates were more accepted, it would both make it more welcoming for newcomers to ask questions, and encourage people to update the answers to old questions (by answering the new questions).

notyourwork 10y ago
I'm not sure what the right answer is but I agree duplicate answers allow me to garner different perspectives or approaches to the same problem. This can be very helpful as you might be missing a simple parameter that makes the checked answer not correct in your situation.
chipperyman573 10y ago
I've found that if I acknowledge the duplicate (which is very easy considering when you post a new question it shows you similar posts) and state a reason it doesn't work any more (even if that is just, "has anything changed?") it rarely gets flagged as a dupe.
x1798DE 10y ago
I don't totally understand why people worry so much about your question being marked as a duplicate. Questions marked as duplicates are not deleted and still show up in search results - the reason why duplicates are still kept around after being marked is because they sorta want duplicate questions on the site, because every person is going to state their query in slightly different language, and you want people searching using different terms to end up in the same place. Most of the time if your question is mostly a duplicate but the other question (or its answer) is missing some critical factor, then you can appeal and say, "I don't think this is a duplicate of <x> because <y>" (or modify your question with the stipulation that the answer solve the critical factor) and the duplicate marking will be removed. The other thing is, even when questions get marked as duplicates or closed, half the time I still see them accumulating their own answers, so really, what's the big issue?
- DanBC 10y ago
  If you ask a question and it genuinely has been answered elsewhere a friendly note "I think your question is answered here [url], is there anything that isn't answered by that question?" is useful. But "duplicate of [url]" often links to a question that has enough differences to not be a dupe. It's hostile, and it's a sign that incentives are out of alignment.
  - x1798DE 10y ago
    But just telling someone the answer might be available somewhere else doesn't direct future traffic to the canonical question, which is the entire point of the "marked as duplicate" flag. If your question gets marked as duplicate and the question it's a duplicate of is a different question, it is not very hard to get it "re-opened". Maybe people don't know that this is true, but I think the main people having problems with questions marked as duplicates are new users where you've had very little time to educate them about what it means to have your question marked as a duplicate (basically, not much). Even if you made the "marked as duplicate" flag less obtrusive or whatever, politely saying, "Your question may have an answer at <url>" probably will get interpreted as "RTFM", and called user-hostile as well. As an aside, my only experience with having a question marked as a duplicate happened on a sister SE site - it was my first post there, I asked a question, then after posting I found the answer in one of the "related questions" links on the sidebar. I answered my own question with a link to the other question and a description of the answer I found there, then flagged my own post as a duplicate. Both the question and answer were highly upvoted.
    - DanBC 10y ago
      > it is not very hard to get it "re-opened". I'd be interested to see some statistics. I strongly suspect that when most newbies are told to fuck off that they do, in fact, fuck off.
      - x1798DE 10y ago
        I don't disagree with that assessment, per se, but I don't think much can be done about it. The message doesn't say, "Fuck off, you worthless loser", it says (taken from the site), "This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please edit this question to explain how it is different or ask a new question." The fact that you interpret this as "fuck off" more or less proves my point that anything hinting at, "Maybe the answer can be found here" will be interpreted by new users as "fuck off". As for statistics, you may be able to find some by querying the data explorer: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new I suspect it would be difficult to (automatically) distinguish between instances where a user was discouraged by the message and instances where the user's question was answered at the link. Perhaps the fraction of instances where the question was edited after being marked as a duplicate, then re-opened, is an OK metric for how willing a given community is to re-open questions.

martinald 10y ago

Agreed. I usually use 'site:stackoverflow.com [[query]]' in Google with search terms limiting pages that have been updated in the last year or so. Filters a lot of the very old answers out which often can send you on a totally wrong direction because the ecosystem has changed so much. Perhaps SO will end up getting overtaken by a new similar site, not because it is intrinsically better, just because they reset the corpus of answers so the SNR is higher for a while? I imagine SO will become increasingly less useful as their Q&A gets older and older.

mhurron 10y ago
> Perhaps SO will end up getting overtaken by a new similar site It will, and then in 5 or so years we'll be hearing the same complaints about that service. SO's problem is people, so unless you can come up with a service that removes them you're going to have the same issue.
douche 10y ago
This is really a much smaller problem if you stick to languages outside the churn'n'burn whizzbang web world. A lot of answers from the Java 1.6 era, or about .Net 3.5, or Python 2.7 are still largely relevant. Best practices in C/C++ have been even more static, aside from a few additions in recent modern standards that few seem to actually use.
- rubber_duck 10y ago
  C# changed a decent amount since 3.5 to dotnet core, similar to python 2 to 3 which also changed a lot of stuff. And C++11 is practically a new backwards compatible language compared to legacy C++. Java is more stable but at the same time it's also the slowest to evolve which is why many developers prefer C# even if it wasn't cross platform in the past - the language was just superior because of how fast it is evolving, considering that at 1.0 they were basically equivalent.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mattmanser 10y ago

I think the accepted answer causes a lot of problems, I personally think that after 3-6 months it should no longer pin it as the top answer, votes should. Not sure if it's ever been discussed on meta, I don't understand why they haven't done it already, seems a reasonable solution.

robin_reala 10y ago
It has been discussed, and fairly recently: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326095/please-unpin-the-accepted-answer-from-the-top http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326095/please-unpin-...
MasterScrat 10y ago
I asked that once on Meta, my question got downvoted to an horrifying level (-17 or something) and I ended up deleting it. I learned afterward Meta downvote don't actually impact your rep but still.

notyourwork 10y ago

Its crazy that SO isn't able to spoon fed devs answers to their specific need based on solutions to other people's specific needs. If people would put it in these terms they would realize they should have to read a bit and have to earn their solution to their problem. Frankly, even if the most upvoted answer looks correct I still take the time to read all other answers, comments and perhaps a few other similarly related questions. Perhaps I am unique in this but I also find myself rarely relying on SO first and usually as a last ditch resort for odd scenarios. SO has consolidated a massive amount of information and is a great resource. People expect too much of words though and should have to do some work themselves.