This is exactly the reason I can never understand how it is impossible for the community in SO to override the accepted answer. The argument goes that the accep

This is exactly the reason I can never understand how it is impossible for the community in SO to override the accepted answer. The argument goes that the accepted answer is the one that satisfies the asker's needs so it is always the one that gets placed higher up. But in practice things aren't so cut and dry. - The asker can misunderstand the response. - The asker can accept a response that for the general public's interpretation of the question is incorrect. It doesn't matter what the asker thought the question means to them if beyond their control their answer becomes the first result on Google years later for a problem that might not be exactly the same. - Technologies change and new libraries or language features can be added since the question was asked. I've counted several times where people bunch up below the accepted answer to say this is true, and 90% of the time it's the better answer for my use case. - The question is similar to another that is far more popular and happens to share the same SEO keywords but is completely unrelated, so another answer with 1,000 upvotes in comparison to the original answer's 100 is added. People have no choice but to put comments saying "this is the wrong answer if you're doing X, use the other one," because the comment section of the accepted answer is the highest up they can be seen. But the average user might not listen or see the smaller comment text and use the wrong answer, just because it was the accepted one. This is because a single person's decision on what "correct" means is valued more highly than the correctness of the more important answer which thousands more people actually support, and is more critical to support because of unintended search indexing. Sometimes SO questions become used for a purpose completely unrelated to the original questions and answers because of search engines. There should be some kind of acknowledgement of this instead of being unable to protect clueless people from themselves. This isn't to support editorialization of old answers in general, it's a problem of unintended consequences out of anyone's control because of what gets indexed as the first search result on Google. Nobody can change what's there if nobody but the original authors can edit the answer and they happen to not do so for whatever reason, so we'd be stuck being misled forever. And as we've seen people will copy and paste anything in the code box and not even read the description and caveats if there's a fat green checkmark next to it like a Pavlonian reflex. I'm guilty of this myself.