alt Hacker News> This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer.
My personal single biggest source of frustration with SO has been outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time. It feels like SO started solidifying and failed to do the moderation cleaning and maintenance needed to keep it current and thriving. The over-moderation you described helps people for a short time but then doesn’t help the person who googles much later. I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one.
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They introduced recent-votes-count-more, perhaps five years ago.
yes I noticed this as well, over the past few years, its happened again and again that the "Top Answer" ends up being useless and I found myself constantly sorting the answers by "Recent" to find the ones that are actually useful and relevant
Having gotten used to SO, I was shocked when I found I could mark multiple answers correct on AskMetafilter. It felt like an innovation.
> There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.
Yeah it's doubly stupid because the likelihood of becoming outdated is one of the reasons they don't allow "recommendation" questions. So they know that it's an issue but just ignore it for programming questions.
> outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.... I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one.
Okay, but who's going to arbitrate that? It's not like anyone was going to delete answers with hundreds of upvotes because someone thought it was wrong or outdated. And there are literally about a million questions per moderator, and moderators are not expected to be subject matter experts on anything in particular. Re-asking the question doesn't actually help, either, except sometimes when the question is bad. (It takes serious community effort to make projects like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 work.)
The Trending sort was added to try to ameliorate this, though.