Hacker News Reader

Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

We've been asking for this for years.

> There was a 43.6% decrease in users copying from the accepted answer when the highest-scored answer was shown first.

Good. As much as I hate that people copy and paste without reading through code and understanding it, if they're going to it, I'd rather them not copy potentially insecure stuff.

For those who don't fully understand - the "accepted" answer (the one that helped the poster of the question, the OP) used to be shown even before an answer that was upvoted more than it - even in cases where the spread is hundreds or even thousands of rep.

The problem with this is that a single person (the OP) got to dictate which answer on a potentially frequently viewed question got the most attention, and by proxy, which code got copy/pasted the most.

This, despite another answer probably having better, more secure, more thoughtful, or more performant code as reflected by the hundreds of people that upvoted it.

View on HN

Another side effect was that a question that might have had a perfectly fine answer that was accepted back when the question was posed in 2010, now might be very much not the right approach. I feel like I frequently see questions where down in the other answers are multiple answers posted in the intervening years with much simpler and more readable answers. Or even if there isn't some new way of performing the solution, there might just be a reason why it's become the wrong question in and of itself and an explanation for why this is the wrong road nowadays is provided.

This is a very important point - many questions on SO that come up first in Google results are VERY old, and the accepted answer may no longer apply with later versions of whatever is being asked about, and the original poster may be long gone or even dead.

But preserving the old solution is also important. Sometimes we have to maintain old versions so it's very helpful to be able to look up answer from that time.

That information should appear towards the bottom of the answers, not the top.

There's a defacto curation of SO answers now based on oldest answer on top, which is almost backwards. Which is a flaw of voting systems.

Reddit has an analogous problem where the first person to make an widely accessible quip gets voted straight to the top, with generally a trainwreck of low effort chuckles and puns hanging off of that. If you want lots of reddit comment karma you can easily just read some popular subreddit by 'new' and make those kinds of low effort / accessible comments.

I wish SO would expire questions. It would go a long way toward making sure the answers that come up in search are current. Popular questions would get asked again organically in short order.

It would mess with the way they do points, but so what? The goal is to be the best resource for developers; the point system should just be a tool for doing that.

They would not have to actually delete old questions, just kill their search rank so newer questions take precedence. Can be done by assigning a new URL and noindexing the redirect from the old one.

Or google and other search engines, which probably special case SO already, could weigh the age of the questions and answers when ranking results.

They probably do? Just like for news articles?

StackOverflow built itself as a Question and Answer site and you can see the results of that original concept.

Had they instead built themselves as a symptom and treatment website, much of the problems that they have had would have gone away.

The original asker should not have nearly as much power as they do. Duplicates would instead be other symptoms. If you had a cough 5 years ago, come March of last year the cure would have changed for the same symptoms. But since SO is a question site, they would not have responded to such.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com