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Comment by nox101 | Hacker News Reader

The issue that stuck out to me is the fact that top hits of "how to do X" on the web, often lead to bad solutions, bad practices, outdated info. And, they keep spreading forever. Someone finds the bad solution, copies it into their code, someone else references their code, copies the bad solution again.

I have no solutions to fix this but I sometimes see it happen where someone asks a question on S.O. or Reddit. Someone posts a bad-practice solution that happens to work. It's marked as the answer, upvoted, and now it spreads like an infection.

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If only the software in question had been written by a company worth nearly four trillion dollars, which would allow them to spend some money on comprehensive documentation that was kept up to date.

This would be less of an issue if official documentation was less universally terrible.

They need to filter out possible malicious actors so a downvote alone wouldn't cause the question to be disregarded... but still, whenever you see that, cast your vote!

Also, a comment is the most powerful tool you have. I've benefited multiple times from kind souls that added a comment in an incorrect answer, to the tone of "as of 2024 this is a bad solution and it's much better to do as told here [link...]". So try to add a comment too if you spot bad answers, please :-)

I agree S.O. is good at this since it has comments and you can add new answers as well as edit old ones. But, the rest of the internet is covered in outdated articles that never get updated. Also Reddit which auto-closes its threads.

It's good for a career, though, especially if you enjoy cleaning up messes

And now we have AI coding assistants training on that code as well

Sometimes I even notice when you go into comment sections trying to say that certain techniques are not best practices, people call you elitist, say you're making nothing more than appeals to authority, and say there's nothing wrong with (whatever equivalent of) NSCopyObject, so get off your high horse.

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