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points by mort96 20 hours ago | 0 comments

My biggest issue with SO was that all the answers were outdated. In the beginning, if you found an answer on SO it'd be still relevant because SO was relatively new. But then as it got older, so did the answers to questions.

The ridiculously strict "no duplicates" policy guaranteed that the old, increasingly outdated answers would remain the only answers forever. In retrospect, I believe a site like SO wants to encourage some rate of duplicates, to ensure that answers remain fresh.

Just yesterday I looked something up on SO and the answer was 14 years old. Would've been a pretty relevant answer back when I first started using SO, but not now.

They really killed themselves through strict moderation. It's incredibly sad, it was a good resource while it lasted.

[–] ceejayoz 18 hours ago

I think SO really needed a "vote to unaccept / mark outdated this answer" or proper supercession process.

[–] rcxdude 17 hours ago

I think the intended approach was basically to just edit the top answer to update it. One of SO's issues I think was that it couldn't really decide if it wanted to be a Q/A site or a wiki and so subverted the expectations of both.

[–] mort96 17 hours ago

I think you're right that that was their expectation/intention. I think it failed because experts don't just randomly go through old questions and make modifications. What prompts knowledgeable people to share their knowledge is new questions asked by new people.

[–] ryathal 11 hours ago

I think the problem is that the creators, and by extension the moderators were bought into the idea of a giant wiki of all programming knowledge. The vast majority of the users just wanted a Q&A site. This led to the infighting and lots of counter intuitive rules as the gamification part conflicted with the goals of being a wiki.

[–] kstrauser 15 hours ago

That approach was untenable because then it still attributed the answer to the original author, even when the content was updated. That could cause real-world issues. “Hey, why did you say that Python is untyped on SO? I thought you knew something about it.” “I never said any such thing.” “Here’s your answer where you say it!” “WTF.” And sure enough, there’s some dumb answer with crappy grammar and mistakes, still attributed to you.

That was a terrible, awful plan, and I always reverted edits to my answers that went beyond fixing typos or updating old links.

[–] ourmandave 17 hours ago

Some sort of version number would help. I use .NET and if the most current answer is on a question asked 15 years ago, I'll never see it.