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points by skydhash 18 hours ago | 0 comments
> 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.

I would generally classify those as “homework” questions.

[–] Retric 18 hours ago
That slowly changing landscape killed SO. Every year a higher percentage of answers were wrong because they got outdated, and removing duplicates made it worse.

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 15 hours ago
This is part of the problem with AI, and probably the vast majority of sites online... even citations to textbooks (god knows how many papers have been superseded or are outdated, also).

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.

[–] ezconnect 14 hours ago
It is hard to describe the feeling of seeing things getting archived in real life. It will be very sad once SO is deleted from the web. When I needed a good description of a new computer stuff I usually go to Anandtech and now the whole site is now gone and all the knowledge on it. The future generation can't even dig it out of the ground like what archeologist are doing right now to piece some of our history. One day SO will be deleted from the web and all the knowledge it holds just like the old Usenet and Yahoo/Google groups with vast knowledge just deleted.