There are two conflicting purposes going on here: the need for archival, and the need for discussion. Over the course of 10 years, its clear that some information should be archived, while other material should be rediscussed and reupped.
I'll plug my "idea" again (just an idea guy, lol). Which is that question/answer sites need to have an "epoch period" of sorts. Back in the 90s, I used to play a browser-based MMO game called Utopia (and its sister game: Earth 2025). Every 6 months, the scoreboard would be archived and the game reset.
The idea is: players come and go. You need a time for players to "leave" (ex: retire for a season, or permanently). But you also want to keep connected players together (ex: a kingdom of 20 players may have become friends, so you want to keep those social connections).
Resetting the game from scratch every few months meant that all players were nominally on equal grounds. It also allowed the game to change its rules and rebalance from update to update (maybe some strategies were too strong, or too weak).
Q&A sites would benefit from this. If a question is renewed in a later epoch / season, maybe its truly different than the historical answer from 5 years ago.
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StackOverflow also treated its upvotes/downvotes like a game. I am convinced that this causes long-term issues in the community. Resetting these points back from scratch (with maybe historical notes on former points) would go a long way towards determining who is or isn't active and at which times. (Ex: someone may have been highly active from 2014 to 2016, and the archives would indicate it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're well-versed in 2020-2021 "season" rules or culture)
I always check answers for such cautionary comments. And if they point to another answer, I upvote it and downvote the original. So I'm not sure "never" is accurate such that SO should be considered "dead".
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...