Whenever I took the time to make a long answer on a question, I saw some mod close the question as a duplicate of an existing one - even though the question could have some minute detail that was different, or perhaps there was some recent change in the landscape that meant an answer in 2020 would be different from one in 2013. But no: aggressive marking as duplicate even though clearly as a _community_ it would be much better to have a more recent discussion, perhaps more alternative answers and just allowing the near-duplicates.
[–] skydhash 19 hours ago
[–] Retric 19 hours ago
I don’t think anyone in the org wanted to face the fact that the underlying assumptions in their model was flawed. The older an upvote the less reliable it becomes.
[–] jambalaya8 16 hours ago
I feel that people are not getting that is one of the larger issues with AI and pretty much everywhere people interact online.
Many of these places and projects were things we truly poured our energy into. But people change, just as operating systems and commandline executables do. At the same time, places like that, once they are gone, lose their weight... so any site that was really large or particularly represented a version of the zeitgeist of whatever subgroup, once it goes defunct, is kind of written out of any sort of AI historical lookup.
Also, there's so many answers on SO that a lot of people just use the Search function to find answers, if they choose to use SO instead of google or whatever. It is very useful for older and historical answers.
I would generally classify those as “homework” questions.