Incorrect Stack Exchange answers make me angry

It takes quite a few confirmations to mark a question as a duplicate except if it's a Community Moderator (with the diamond), there's only a few of them so it's unlikely they are the "unilateral" culprit.

But SE is not YouTube. On the latter, it doesn't matter what comment has the most likes.

On SE however, one can say that what answer gets the most upvotes is the most important aspect of the site.

For me, the date of the answer had become a key information to check before I even reading the answer.

I use Django a lot and it significantly evolved over the years. And for too many times, I'd spend time implementing a solution, only to realize it no longer worked since version x.y that was published z years ago.

The thing is, stack exchange was built to serve an industry characterized by its very rapid evolution overtime. Yet, it fails, IN MY OPINION, to adress such a key element in a graceful way.

The documentation industry solved this years ago. Going back to Django again, its doc site allows users to select the version they're interested in order to show them relevant content.

I think stack exchange needs to implement something similar for its answers. How can that work? Well, users can be allowed to add tags to mark versions where they know the solution doesn't apply anymore. It may not be the earliest version where this issue arises, and that's understandable. Other users can later refine the threshold data.

SE can then display the info where searchers can easily spot it [Answer not applicable since x.y] and avoid them some confused head scratching.

We can push this even further with multiple correct answers for a single question, depending on the version. Users can even add the version of different software they're interested in and see the correct answer that applies higher, regardless of number of upvotes.

(Written on my phone. Apologies for typos.)

This is a matter of a skewed voting system too. The comment explaining the answer is wrong has 38 upvotes, but the answer has only 12 downvotes. This means there are at least 26 people who agreed with the criticism, but were either unable to cast a downvote or refused to cast one (in the name of Positivity™, probably).

I think the initial design principles of Stack Overflow - basically that the balance of incentives will determine the outcome - is still sound. And the initial years of the site showed the people in control were very smart and thoughtful about structuring and fine tuning the incentives.

The problem is that fine tuning (and occasional restructuring) needs to be an ongoing process, and it has stopped. It feels like the original creators left and the site has been coasting on auto-pilot for a few years now.

That's what worries me about the future of SO. It was an enormous improvement over what came before (in fact was created as a reaction to the horrible status quo - expertsexchange anyone?). But if it's left to continue to wither it will eventually become like those sites.

I agree but it needn't inherently be this way, I think it's mostly influenced by the incentives of the site.

Asking questions about X very specific thing on Y very specific version of Z specific technology should have answers that can be correct forever, as well as being very searchable.

However, the setup of the site is such that questions like that aren't rewarded, for all the reasons we are familiar with. Instead effort and attention tend to funnel towards very generic, high level, sometimes even tech agnostic questions that accrue hundreds to thousands of upvotes and orders of magnitude more views.

Unfortunately for these, the 'right' or most appropriate answers of course very much moreso change in time.

> Very few good questions have received the love required to keep them relevant

Some questions receive so much of the love that it brings really wild ideas to casual reader's mind - what would happen if software involved in the question would be changed? Wouldn't it bring joy and collectively insane amount of saved time?

Like this question with 13.8m views - let's assume 5min for every viewer, ~131 years collectively. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/927358/how-do-i-undo-the...

That's not enough on its own to fix the problems outlined

It's not a simple wrong answer. It's a poorly designed system that causes a pattern of wrong answers, on this question and others. For comparison, consider the consensus on this site when that system is Google search giving wrong results.

How can there be peace when someone is wrong in the internet?

So enraged that it makes you write a blog post with profanities in red, bold type no less!

How do you sleep at night, knowing that somebody, somewhere in the world is wrong, and you are powerless to challenge their mistake?

Speaking for myself, quite peacefully, thank you!

That was the same thought I had :)

And not only that, wrong answer on a privately owned for-profit website.

If anything the fact that they haven't been overrun with spam and that they're so popular shows that it does work for a ridiculously large amount of people.

That's not to say it's not annoying to get arbitration in a niche section of SO/SE site. The site could use a bit more transparency, but that's a difficult balance. I've been a community moderator and also on the receiving end of a power user's whims, so maybe it's perspective or maybe it's bias, but I can't say the system is necessarily going downhill.

Well said. Power users chasing points and power now dominate and their incentives are not fully aligned with maintaining a high quality Q&A site

This is sort of my fear with LLMs. Not even that they spit out bad answers, since bad answers are everywhere, or even that there is no good way to verify the quality of the answers, it’s that it will drive away the use of overflow sites. I know that the article is a rant about SO, but they even admit the correct answer is present on the page. I look to stack overflow to find out what I don’t know about a question, not to find out what the top answer is. Comments and alternate solutions are it’s super power, and from what I’ve seen posted in the last year, usage numbers are down for SO.

As some higher-up comments have stated, since the answer is Closed as duplicate, it is more limited to interaction than a regular open answer.

Also editing an answer to something completely different is definitely not in the right way to "solve" bad answers, I think. My guess is the edits would be revoked, in any case.

I feel like the move here is to post your question as a new post, answer your own question, and link to your question/answer in a comment on your answer in the original question.

Those answers are answers to the question and deserve to be on the site. I've often benefitted from answers like these.

Dear god. This site still exists????!!! I thought it shut down like ... 10 years ago.