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Stack Overflow was the greatest thing ever when it was new. It was brilliant. But all ideas have a lifecycle. I am wondering if some aspects of Stack Exchange
by Theodores 7y ago
Stack Overflow was the greatest thing ever when it was new. It was brilliant.
But all ideas have a lifecycle. I am wondering if some aspects of Stack Exchange are getting a bit ossified.
The answers themselves are a case in point. How to centre content in HTML being a classic example. Years ago you needed to do negative margin hacks, a few years later you could do transforms. Now you can just use the layout engine that now comes with CSS - CSS Grid - and just do align/justify items/self to center and that is it, no hacks needed.
But if you go on to SO to look up an answer you will see the answer from a decade ago with a thousand upvotes, seventy hacky answers and no mention whatsoever of the 2017+ CSS Grid method. The moderators would have locked down the answers a few years ago. So, in suspended animation, is an incorrect answer that has thousands of upvotes.
If you know nothing of HTML you could just copy/paste the answer and be happy with it, even give it an upvote. But then to unlearn the hack method for the new CSS Grid method would be not what you would want to do.
The more you know about an area of knowledge the more you realise that SO answers could make you get it badly wrong.
This is purely due to the age of the site. Plus the people who were writing answers originally no longer do so. They have oved on professionally and just don't need the mod points any more than they need gold stars from a school teacher.
Another aspect of the ossification is when you have too many admin people accrue in an organisation. The merch for the giveaways costs too, things that were once nice to have to get things started become expected. The money that was once found for promoting new topic websites now becomes table stakes.
I think they need to focus more on the core product - SO - and not the other sites. If questions had an 'is this answer set outmoded?' checkbox that people who know the subject could flag then they might be able to get some detritus removed from the content.
If they are thus able to keep SO relevant then all should be good for revenue.
As for on the other sites, can we expect this to make it more like Quora or am I being pessimistic?
- buboard 7y agoI agree they should just archive the old questions or de-SEO them on purpose. It happens way too often and is a big time waster.
- sefrost 7y agoMy experience is that many answers have been updated by other users with up to date information. It says "edited" under the answer with the date, and you can see every version of the text. It's great that people take the time to do this!
- Theodores 7y agoThere is some feedback and the dashboards are great so you can do this. But I haven't any interest in those answers I wrote up a decade ago (or whenever it was) and the domain expertise is no longer in my working knowledge. I don't believe I am alone in moving on that way. Also some people learn one way of doing things and then stick to it, even if a better way comes along. Apart from pride there is no motivation to update your decade old answers. Potential employers look for online stuff in repositories rather than SO answers.