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> The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the

> The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." The problem with this is that answers change, for some languages the way you did X 5 years ago might still be the best way to do X, but for another language it's no longer the best way of doing it. And while S.O has done a good job of moderating and make sure they are that high quality source of info, they caused a second order effect in that no one wants to post there anymore. After a while you're left with a bunch of outdated answers and no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged". The authors example of any new JS answers being marked as dups and old jquery answers being provided instead is exactly what I am talking about. I hardly ever use S.O for JS questions anymore because everything is from 5+ years ago with examples in Jquery or ES5 that you have to translate to modern JS. Yeah those are high quality answers, if we were all still using Jquery. S.O could have gone about producing the "searchable corpus of answers" in a different way that would have preserved the quality but not dejected all of it's users.

thedonkeycometh 4y ago
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the8472 4y ago
> no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged". I've seen plenty of "20xx: Now we do Y instead of X" answers posted years after the original answer.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  Sure, half the time -- and even then they are usually beneath the stale answer.
  - the8472 4y ago
    Having to scan through more than one answer isn't that terrible, better than not having an answer at all.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  My favorite was one where the top answer was: > No, there is no such feature, so I made a custom hotkey: Ctrl + ` And then a few years later Microsoft implemented the feature and made the default hotkey Ctrl + ` --- I felt a bit of trepidation editing a top answer with >1k votes, but I did it: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/43012779/revisions https://stackoverflow.com/posts/43012779/revisions Probably they need a deprecate-answer feature instead.
artificial 4y ago
Where’s your preferred JS forum?
arp242 4y ago
> After a while you're left with a bunch of outdated answers and no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged". I have answered many old questions and never once has this been flagged; usually it gets upvoted. I have 10 "necromancer" badges: "Answer a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more" – some of these answered questions that were over ten years old. And this excludes the answers which haven't gathered 5 upvotes (yet). Answering old questions is absolutely worthwhile in my experience.
snthrow 4y ago
There's no such feature on SO as "answers being marked as dupes" Only questions can be marked as dupes.

thedonkeycometh 4y ago

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the8472 4y ago

> no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged". I've seen plenty of "20xx: Now we do Y instead of X" answers posted years after the original answer.

jjoonathan 4y ago
Sure, half the time -- and even then they are usually beneath the stale answer.
- the8472 4y ago
  Having to scan through more than one answer isn't that terrible, better than not having an answer at all.
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
My favorite was one where the top answer was: > No, there is no such feature, so I made a custom hotkey: Ctrl + ` And then a few years later Microsoft implemented the feature and made the default hotkey Ctrl + ` --- I felt a bit of trepidation editing a top answer with >1k votes, but I did it: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/43012779/revisions https://stackoverflow.com/posts/43012779/revisions Probably they need a deprecate-answer feature instead.

artificial 4y ago

Where’s your preferred JS forum?

arp242 4y ago

> After a while you're left with a bunch of outdated answers and no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged". I have answered many old questions and never once has this been flagged; usually it gets upvoted. I have 10 "necromancer" badges: "Answer a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more" – some of these answered questions that were over ten years old. And this excludes the answers which haven't gathered 5 upvotes (yet). Answering old questions is absolutely worthwhile in my experience.

snthrow 4y ago

There's no such feature on SO as "answers being marked as dupes" Only questions can be marked as dupes.