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Comment by marcelluspye | Hacker News Reader

>SO isn't dying any time soon, and the content is still good.

While I'd say this is currently true, answers on SO tend to stick around for a long time, and the 'marked as duplicate'-heavy behavior means that even if the best practice to solving a given problem changes, the top SO google result won't. While this isn't a _huge_ problem right now, with the way the site is set up I only see it getting worse, to the point that some years down the line I imagine many SO answers will either cease to be relevant or push people down the wrong path when solving a problem.

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Marked as duplicate and closed for being too broad are annoying. Often, the "duplicate" is actually a different question with a different answer and many of the too broad ones are not too broad, can be answered easily, and can make it easier than reading 10 other threads and pulling the needed information from each.

I now try to see if Stack Overflow has an answer and if I am not able to really understand what is going on, I don't bother to post a question because I hate how the 'keepers' pounce on you. Instead I find an SME by networking within my org and get it answered

Highly upvoted answers are usually converted into "wiki entries", so that they can evolve, extend and restructure with time. It somehow alleviates the problem, as long as the both sides (asking and answering) care to actually update it.

I'm skeptical that happens very often.

The only wiki answers I've seen have been hugely popular with dozens of answers and hundreds of votes. Maybe it happens outside of that, but it's definitely not how it "usually" works, IME.

Most of the questions I see on SO have maybe 0-5 answers, and the average number of votes is something like 2. If you're lucky there's an accepted answer and/or an answer with a clear majority of votes. I've even seen cases where the accepted answer is wrong, while a more upvoted answer is correct.

SO could be the internet's technical manual if good answers were properly organised and maintained - if the point of providing answers was to document 'how to do programming' and you could only close a duplicate by explaining how to documented answer applies. But the incentive is get in fast, answer and move on to the next question.

That was the idea behind tag-wikis at one point ( see http://stackoverflow.com/tags/scala/info ) and was the utopian ideal of what Documentation would become.

Organizational and writing skill don't necessarily correlate well to programming skill. And when one adds gamification to that allowing for material curated by the masses without the corresponding community investment by those who _do_ have that skill set... well.

You can edit the top answer or post a new answer, I have got 50 odd votes from adding asp.net's encryption/decryption methods that were added in 3.5 to old .net encryption questions.

I've done it on a few other answers too, if the top answer seems clunky or inelegant, I tend to dig a bit deeper to see if there's a better way.

Also, scrolling down a bit in the answers you usually find new ways of doing something as answer 3 or 4. Just upvote it. Or edit the answer into the top answer.

You can. Most people can't. As the site gets aggressive against newcomers and old timers decide they have better things to do, there will be less and less people available edit them.

And don't think those editions are as high quality as the ones that come by the official channel, where literally anybody in the world with the needed knowledge can reply, and there is a robust process for vetting.

Besides, despite any theoretical possibility, people mostly do not edit old SO answers. There are exceptions, but outdated answer mostly stay there.

I'm an incredibly lazy programmer, I remember nothing, it's simply not worth it imho. I hate man pages and specs and generally reading boring tech docs. I hate memorising stuff.

I Google incredibly basic stuff like how to read files, how to read a web page (something that changes every 5 months in .Net), hell, even basic jQuery functionality.

The difference is that I have the knowledge deep down, I just use SO and Google as a prompt. I know the correct answer as soon as I see it. I get exposed to a lot of basic answers on SO, and generally they're right.

SO is generally good and is not suffering the problem you or the OP claim.

The site isn't aggressive against newcomers, it's aggressive against bad form questions/answers. Which is usually, it is true, done by newcomers because they don't know how to make a good form ones. This is a social problem which is very hard to solve - how to make people produce high quality content without discouraging them too much when they produce low quality. Some people would be annoyed and leave. But I think SO found a model that largely works - at least for the most of my questions, I found pretty good answers. For some, I found none, but neither did I find answers in any other place.

> it's aggressive against bad form questions/answers

You're absolutely wrong in that case. Particularly answers being "good" or "correct" is not part of the mission statement; and the rules reject fixes of questions by default for not being "in the spirit of the poster".

All SO aims for is having the most questions/answers. Nothing else.

That wasn't my experience. In fact, this:

> All SO aims for is having the most questions/answers. Nothing else.

Is demonstrably false. If that were the only aim, questions would never be closed and there would be no need for a moderation system. They fact that they do have moderation system and do police questions and answers is the proof that quality is part of the equation.

That just weeds out the questions that would make SO look obviously bad.

It does nothing to affect the quality of answers that look ok, but are actually problematic. And in those cases "spirit of poster" always trumps correctness.

> You can edit the top answer or post a new answer

Nope you can't.

- You'll be blocked if your edit is not "in the spirit of the originally post(er)".

If you only have to add a separate and standalone paragraph at the end on a newer subfeature (like your asp example), it's generally fine.

If you have to rewrite one of the main paragraph, the reviewers will systematically reject your edit.

Typically, that means that there is no way to update an obsolete post when the tools or best practices have changed, because it's considered major changes diverging from the original author.

- Combine that with the aggressive policy of closing and locking down questions, and it's impossible to post a new separate answer on most of the questions.

Absolutely this. I ran into the issue today where somebody had posted an ambiguous answer. Mods rejected edits to clarify, the user themselves said "it's not ambiguous to me", and the question itself is locked.

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