First time I edited an accepted answer a couple years back (the original answer was pretty much correct, I just fixed a compiling issue and one missing flag that now needed to be set, but not originally), it was quickly rejected with nonsensical stock rejection templates.

I guess I learned my lesson to never spend time to make accepted answers better.

And then a year later, someone added a comment to mention that flag that needed to be set.

I agree that there is a contradiction in the moderation: on the one hand, you get moderated if you update a question/answer ("because it has to reflect the situation of the author when it happened"), and on the other hand you get moderated when you ask a similar question ("duplicated").

I find it okay to not update the answers: just like a blog post or a newspaper article, I find value in being able to say "this person had this problem in 2012, and this other person provided a fix also in 2012". But then it should be fine to ask the exact same question a couple years later if one expects a different answer. And it should not be marked as a duplicate. If anything, it could be marked as a duplicate after the answer is accepted, if it turns out to be the same (and if the new question has no value). But in reality, when I am stuck on a problem, I don't mind checking 5 similar answers. It's much better to have to find a solution from 5 similar questions than to not find it at all because it was moderated away.

Also it would keep people engaged: the current policy means that for some topics, it's very hard to contribute questions/answers because there are so many already. But in reality, many of the existing ones are more than 5 years old! If people could repost similar questions and get points for answering them (instead of being flagged as "duplicate"), it would probably keep the community more engaged.

First: Now that old posts are being updated and duplicates locked, I no longer am able to filter out old posts. Am I expected to check every CSS post in 2012 for some golden answer that unfucks my 2024 grid box layout or can I just check the new ones (that are all locked)?

Second: I don't get what's wrong with letting person A to post in the wrong/old place if they want, and person B can link the URL of the post to the right place. Instead you have person A locking person B's post which might actually hurt their feelings, like being arbitrarily moderated on any other site does, so they never come back.

Third: When Stack overflow moderation approves something, it actually means it's the end of discussion. IIRC the famous SO post about parsing HTML with regex ended with moderation endorsing a meme (the wrong answer) and locking it.

But I'm giving too much attention to SO anyways they could fix everything and I still don't see how it would win back talent.

Yeah, the moderation is truly broken, along with the "accepted answer" framework, and in general the approach to knowledge curation. Kind of amazing to me that the founders/staff of the site didn't try to turn this around.

To add an anecdote: The last question I bothered to answer was one where the accepted answer was a very-specific fix, and a more generic fix was in a comment below that which was better and more directly addressed the root problem and would work for any user encountering an exception (accepted answer was workable, but working at the wrong layer of abstraction to actually solve the problem). I pulled that out into its own answer. Looking back now at that question, the poor "accepted answer" which won't work for anyone hitting this error because it references a specific class in the user's question which won't exist for any other users is still accepted with -5 and the better answer is below the fold at +16. This is pretty typical across a lot of questions. The fact that SO doesn't automatically handle this case is basically a failure of the site's abstraction model and algorithms over answers.

For a site where the long-term value is ostensibly curating high-quality answers to the maximal number of questions, the best answers languish, and the questions and answers don't get sufficiently refined/updated over time. Arguably you'd want something closer to a wikipedia article about each problem that gets built out and updated over time if you want to provide canonical information about problems. Similarly I think the idea of closing things that are close, but different as duplicates has failed. These are often sufficiently different that the details are interesting and probably would provide value/activity/detail to the site. There should probably be some way to roll these up into a higher level article/topic to cover variants of problems, related cases, etc. This could start to act as pillars or knowledge-hubs within SO to get to a place of more canonical information or a more "tacit/practical wikipedia". Really not sure why things stopped at Q&A and seemed to stagnate where they did.

Though, they seemingly achieved profitability and sold for $1.8B without doing any of this, so what do I know. :) Probably the right move was focusing on other things like launching new communities, and making money for the company.

The voting system and accepted answers tools also fail to account for time and always have. A highly voted, accepted answer five years ago might be very wrong today because the frameworks changed or best practices shifted or all sorts of other reasons. There's fundamentally no concept of "these votes are stale over time" or "the accepted answer has changed". There's technically no concept of "this question was asked 4 years, but seems stale, can I get fresh answers?" and in practice a direct antagonism against trying that given the incentives among certain parts of the moderator culture to "close all duplicates quickly".

Many good responders and some of the better heavy handed mods work around the lack of tools for dealing with time with a constant stream of "Update:" and "Update to the Update:" top-level edits to the "accepted answer", but that isn't universal and requires manual intervention, only encourages heavy-handed moderators that heavy-handedness is the "right" approach versus a light touch, ignores what the over-gamified voting system was supposed to represent as the concept of an "answer", and overall sometimes just makes answers look "sloppy" rather than "idempotent".

I think the "moderator capture" by heavy-handed moderators seems an inevitable consequence of the "game" mechanics, where some of the tools have been lacking, and the sorts of people prone to undervaluing their own labor on behalf of companies incentivizing them with "points" over wages. I think the increasing feel of "StackOverflow is stale" is directly for not having time mechanics and a way to refresh answers from time to time as technology changes or shifts. The parts of "StackOverflow" that are as close to "evergreen" as possible are continually edited mini-wikis in a sloppy 90s top-posting USENET thread style that is messy and requires both heavy-handed moderation and works around the tools and the concept that an answer has a single author rather than is enabled by the tools.

ETA: Time in both directions, too: sometimes you are stuck in a legacy codebase and need to know "what was the accepted answer to this question 5 years ago?" and want easier tools to wade through legacy answers than trying to archeology dive through years of poorly organized Wiki editing history and comment history scattered across a N answers and M comments to each answer and/or hope that someone preserved somewhere in the middle of the top-posting thread in the current wiki state.

One common mistake people unfamiliar with how SO works make is confusing "accepted answer" with "best answer". They're often different; accepted just means the person who posted the question found it useful.

>There should probably be some way to roll these up into a higher level article/topic to cover variants of problems, related cases, etc. This could start to act as pillars or knowledge-hubs within SO to get to a place of more canonical information or a more "tacit/practical wikipedia".

There was an attempt to do something like that with the Collectives project but it doesn't seem to have gotten any real momentum going.

This is basically a product failure... I understand the distinction, and yet a negatively voted accepted answer shows up first above a highly-voted non-accepted answer. What is the point of the accepted answer in this scenario? Why rank it first? etc.

You can change the order answers are displayed in to one of a few different sorting methods... The accepted answer hasn't automatically been the first one shown since 2021.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/410859/9952196

Good to know, for some reason my sort sets to `Date modified (newest first)` which seems bad also and I'm certain I never set it this way intentionally, but I guess that explains the issue and I was wrong that they have entirely let this problem languish. Thanks.