Comment by nneonneo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nneonneo | Hacker News Reader

As someone who was very active answering questions on SO, I can say that duplicate or low-quality questions were a pretty big issue on the site. It might be fun to answer “what does * do in a Python function call” once; it’s quite another to answer that same question a dozen times. “Mark as duplicate” is an important way to keep the workload down, and to centralize questions around a single high-quality source of answers.

People also forget that answers are not set in stone. Answers are editable - if an answer needs to be updated for the latest version of a framework, or it’s been obsoleted, just add that to the answer! Low-rep users can suggest edits, while higher-rep users can just go in and edit them. Its not uncommon to see the top answer have an edit pointing at another answer for some newer version.

Centralizing around a single deduplicated answer also has a major benefit: multiple answers can gather on a single question. It’s not always the case that one particular answer works for everyone, so try different answers and see what works (and upvote the ones that do work!)

The real problem is that genuine questions get dupe hammers.

Yes this was the right solution in the Python stone age version, but no longer the right solution in the current one.

Of course I can give an alternative answer on an old question, but it will appear very low on the page and will get missed by regular users.

> if an answer needs to be updated for the latest version of a framework, or it’s been obsoleted, just add that to the answer!

Depending on how much of a change it is, that might also be discouraged. Adding a disclaimer about being for an old version is generally fine, rewriting it for the newest version is a big no-no - that's when it should be a new answer.

> Answers are editable - if an answer needs to be updated for the latest version of a framework, or it’s been obsoleted, just add that to the answer!

Yeah, I tried that, and they've always been reverted without explanation. Best you can do is comment and hope someone reads it. I think that's more common today, since it doesn't take long to realize the comments are where the useful information is found.

> Best you can do is comment and hope someone reads it.

When I use SO these days (which getting much less common over time, I admit), my habit is to read through the comments first because of this problem.

Plus, if the change is significant, it's essentially a different solution entirely. There may be alternative solutions which would vote higher and comment relevance/quality would be impacted, etc. It starts to become unwieldy at a certain point.

Better that solutions can be versioned and possibly linked together for findability.

Kinda hard to get rep nowadays though.

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