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that's something was long discussed on Meta, specially to answer the question: "Is it fair to down-vote answers which were right in 2009, but aren't right anymo

that's something was long discussed on Meta, specially to answer the question: "Is it fair to down-vote answers which were right in 2009, but aren't right anymore?" and the answer was "Yes, if you want to keep your points, you should maintain your answer as long as it exists" which is a kind of no-go for somebody like me with more than 14k points and more than 500 answers...

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Might work if down-voting were trackable. You'd know which answers quit making sense for readers.
- lucb1e 6y ago
  I see which posts of mine were downvoted, if that's what you mean. If someone downvotes I always revisit the post (also most of the time if someone upvotes actually, as I often find things to improve).
- pelasaco 6y ago
  well you can track your down-votes, but is it fair to down-vote something that was right in 2007, but not right in 2020 anymore? Maybe a mechanism to lock old right answers, and open the question again, I'm not sure. That's probably an issue that the Stackoverflow team didn't think about back in the days..
  - lucb1e 6y ago
    One existing mechanism to attract new answers is opening a bounty. I'm not a big fan of the system, but just adding this to the discussion because I think it's the closest thing stackexchange has to an official way to re-open a question for answering. One of the reasons you can select for the bounty is something along the lines of "current answers are outdated".
  - the_af 6y ago
    Why is it unfair? I think SO should care more about the quality of questions and answers than about the reputation score of individual contributors. This is a downside of gamification though: it becomes all about ego and earning points, which I don't think should be the goal of a site like SO. If keeping the quality of the content means some people must lose rep points, then so be it. If they have 14K rep they won't notice, anyway.
    - detaro 6y ago
      A "this is outdated" flag thats independent of downvotes would achieve both goals.
      - the_af 6y ago
        Maybe. It should be coupled with a mechanism to encourage more up to date answers, if possible a link to a better answer if it exists. Also a way to encourage organic searches from finding more up to date answers. The flag should act so that it isn't ripe for abuse (e.g. people flagging out of spite, without evidence). Downvoting does have the side-effect of poking the original author into action, because gamification often means (regrettably) that people do care about rep points. edit: an argument against down/upvoting: I think there is a sizeable "bandwagon" effect. People upvote what already has upvotes, and downvote what already has downvotes. I can't prove it but I'm pretty sure this happens. If so, obsolete answers will never go away by downvoting alone.
    - pelasaco 6y ago
      it is unfair, because the answer isn't necessarily wrong. It's just outdated. If somebody asks "How to do X in rails", and your answer isn't valid in Rails 6 anymore it's not necessarily wrong if it still works with Rails 2.3.8.
bcrosby95 6y ago
Kinda funny. You thought you were answering a question. What you were actually doing was volunteering to maintain a wiki page.
- the_af 6y ago
  You are not mandated though. If you don't want to maintain it, just accept the downvotes. If you have 14K rep, getting downvotes from a couple of obsolete answers is no big deal. When it starts to become a big deal, you can always do something about it -- or alternatively, you can opt to do nothing about it and accept the rep hit, again no big deal.
  - cutemonster 6y ago
    That's from your perspective > downvotes ... is no big deal Some ppl feel sad and anxious about downvotes. The no big deal solution doesn't work with everyone.
- pelasaco 6y ago
  interesting point. I fully agree with that. Every answer is a wiki page. However I strong believe that if the question isn't specific about versions, an answer to an old version of code (gem/pip/etc version X, instead of master) still right. Example if for the question "How to print to stdout with python", the answer " print 'foo'" is right, you just have to use python2.. it is maybe staled, outdated, but not wrong.
boomboomsubban 6y ago
Would you care if suddenly 30 of your answers were now incorrect and you logged into 13k points?
- pelasaco 6y ago
  Unfortunately I care, if a question is generic like "How to test an attachment with Rails and Paperclip". My accepted solution form 2010, still valid, if you download the same version of Rails and Paperclip used back in the days. I personally get angry when people down-vote it and answer it 10 years later saying, in Rails 6, that's wrong..
  - root_axis 6y ago
    Only if the software in question has not been updated much since the question was asked, or your answer specifically includes version numbers or is specific enough that it can be easily deduced that the answer only applies to a specific version. Otherwise, the answer is wrong, because it doesn't make sense to expect someone asking such a generic question to be running a decade old version of the stack and in almost every case they'd be worse off if they opted to use the decade old version of the stack just to make use of your answer.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    I can understand why that's annoying, but I asked how you would feel if your answer was incorrect. Do virtual points matter more than helping people find useful answers?
dgb23 6y ago
Is the incentive there? Both fact checking and editing old answers should lead to points; somehow. Also maybe there is merit in adding structured data (and incentivizing it), which could be used to notify users/writers. For example adding version numbers could be a low hanging fruit.
thomascgalvin 6y ago
> "Yes, if you want to keep your points, you should maintain your answer as long as it exists" This is just one more example of the absolutely toxic culture within Stack Overflow itself. Everyone uses it, but we all get to it from Google. Nobody I know bothers answering questions, and I don't think more than a half-dozen people I know have even submitted questions. If you do, the gatekeepers are going to jump down your throat.
- secondcoming 6y ago
  Is it really 'absolutely toxic' or perhaps just 'unfortunate', or 'a flaw'?
- NateEag 6y ago
  I've answered a few questions casually on StackOverflow, when I ran into something that was unanswered and I knew what the answer was, but I've never invested seriously in it, as you can see from my profile: https://stackoverflow.com/users/1128957/nateeag https://stackoverflow.com/users/1128957/nateeag I've also never had a gatekeeper jump down my throat. I think you are overstating how bad SO's culture is. I have definitely seen problems there, but they aren't the whole of the story. (Though SO itself has entirely lost my goodwill due to the Monica Cellio incident: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-community-managers-stack-exchange-is-not-interested-in-cooperating-with/342950#342950 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-commu... )
- root_axis 6y ago
  How is it toxic? It seems pretty logical to me. If the answer is wrong in its current form then the answer's score should decay relative to others. It doesn't matter if individual users lose upvote points, a user's points are meaningless in aggregate, but on an individual answer they function as a signal for proximity to correctness. If the points are important to you then the burden should be on you to maintain the correctness, we should not enshrine wrong answers in perpetuity in order to appease individual upvote counts.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Might work if down-voting were trackable. You'd know which answers quit making sense for readers.

lucb1e 6y ago
I see which posts of mine were downvoted, if that's what you mean. If someone downvotes I always revisit the post (also most of the time if someone upvotes actually, as I often find things to improve).
pelasaco 6y ago
well you can track your down-votes, but is it fair to down-vote something that was right in 2007, but not right in 2020 anymore? Maybe a mechanism to lock old right answers, and open the question again, I'm not sure. That's probably an issue that the Stackoverflow team didn't think about back in the days..
- lucb1e 6y ago
  One existing mechanism to attract new answers is opening a bounty. I'm not a big fan of the system, but just adding this to the discussion because I think it's the closest thing stackexchange has to an official way to re-open a question for answering. One of the reasons you can select for the bounty is something along the lines of "current answers are outdated".
- the_af 6y ago
  Why is it unfair? I think SO should care more about the quality of questions and answers than about the reputation score of individual contributors. This is a downside of gamification though: it becomes all about ego and earning points, which I don't think should be the goal of a site like SO. If keeping the quality of the content means some people must lose rep points, then so be it. If they have 14K rep they won't notice, anyway.
  - detaro 6y ago
    A "this is outdated" flag thats independent of downvotes would achieve both goals.
    - the_af 6y ago
      Maybe. It should be coupled with a mechanism to encourage more up to date answers, if possible a link to a better answer if it exists. Also a way to encourage organic searches from finding more up to date answers. The flag should act so that it isn't ripe for abuse (e.g. people flagging out of spite, without evidence). Downvoting does have the side-effect of poking the original author into action, because gamification often means (regrettably) that people do care about rep points. edit: an argument against down/upvoting: I think there is a sizeable "bandwagon" effect. People upvote what already has upvotes, and downvote what already has downvotes. I can't prove it but I'm pretty sure this happens. If so, obsolete answers will never go away by downvoting alone.
  - pelasaco 6y ago
    it is unfair, because the answer isn't necessarily wrong. It's just outdated. If somebody asks "How to do X in rails", and your answer isn't valid in Rails 6 anymore it's not necessarily wrong if it still works with Rails 2.3.8.

bcrosby95 6y ago

Kinda funny. You thought you were answering a question. What you were actually doing was volunteering to maintain a wiki page.

the_af 6y ago
You are not mandated though. If you don't want to maintain it, just accept the downvotes. If you have 14K rep, getting downvotes from a couple of obsolete answers is no big deal. When it starts to become a big deal, you can always do something about it -- or alternatively, you can opt to do nothing about it and accept the rep hit, again no big deal.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  That's from your perspective > downvotes ... is no big deal Some ppl feel sad and anxious about downvotes. The no big deal solution doesn't work with everyone.
pelasaco 6y ago
interesting point. I fully agree with that. Every answer is a wiki page. However I strong believe that if the question isn't specific about versions, an answer to an old version of code (gem/pip/etc version X, instead of master) still right. Example if for the question "How to print to stdout with python", the answer " print 'foo'" is right, you just have to use python2.. it is maybe staled, outdated, but not wrong.

boomboomsubban 6y ago

Would you care if suddenly 30 of your answers were now incorrect and you logged into 13k points?

pelasaco 6y ago
Unfortunately I care, if a question is generic like "How to test an attachment with Rails and Paperclip". My accepted solution form 2010, still valid, if you download the same version of Rails and Paperclip used back in the days. I personally get angry when people down-vote it and answer it 10 years later saying, in Rails 6, that's wrong..
- root_axis 6y ago
  Only if the software in question has not been updated much since the question was asked, or your answer specifically includes version numbers or is specific enough that it can be easily deduced that the answer only applies to a specific version. Otherwise, the answer is wrong, because it doesn't make sense to expect someone asking such a generic question to be running a decade old version of the stack and in almost every case they'd be worse off if they opted to use the decade old version of the stack just to make use of your answer.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  I can understand why that's annoying, but I asked how you would feel if your answer was incorrect. Do virtual points matter more than helping people find useful answers?

dgb23 6y ago

Is the incentive there? Both fact checking and editing old answers should lead to points; somehow. Also maybe there is merit in adding structured data (and incentivizing it), which could be used to notify users/writers. For example adding version numbers could be a low hanging fruit.

thomascgalvin 6y ago

> "Yes, if you want to keep your points, you should maintain your answer as long as it exists" This is just one more example of the absolutely toxic culture within Stack Overflow itself. Everyone uses it, but we all get to it from Google. Nobody I know bothers answering questions, and I don't think more than a half-dozen people I know have even submitted questions. If you do, the gatekeepers are going to jump down your throat.

secondcoming 6y ago
Is it really 'absolutely toxic' or perhaps just 'unfortunate', or 'a flaw'?
NateEag 6y ago
I've answered a few questions casually on StackOverflow, when I ran into something that was unanswered and I knew what the answer was, but I've never invested seriously in it, as you can see from my profile: https://stackoverflow.com/users/1128957/nateeag https://stackoverflow.com/users/1128957/nateeag I've also never had a gatekeeper jump down my throat. I think you are overstating how bad SO's culture is. I have definitely seen problems there, but they aren't the whole of the story. (Though SO itself has entirely lost my goodwill due to the Monica Cellio incident: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-community-managers-stack-exchange-is-not-interested-in-cooperating-with/342950#342950 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-commu... )
root_axis 6y ago
How is it toxic? It seems pretty logical to me. If the answer is wrong in its current form then the answer's score should decay relative to others. It doesn't matter if individual users lose upvote points, a user's points are meaningless in aggregate, but on an individual answer they function as a signal for proximity to correctness. If the points are important to you then the burden should be on you to maintain the correctness, we should not enshrine wrong answers in perpetuity in order to appease individual upvote counts.