| > One posted 5 years after the flurry is unlikely to get many votes. Interesting point - perhaps a hybrid scheme to decide the ordering of the answers, that balances upvotes and submission date. It would need to be carefully tuned though - for some questions, answers will age badly ("What's the best way to do parallel stream processing in Java?"), but for others, they essentially won't age at all ("Why is there a small numerical error in this floating-point calculation?"). Perhaps it could be tuned by tag, as a means to estimate how the answers will age. > How about bad information not showing up in my search at all? You don't want the system to be overly sensitive to undeserved downvotes. > Curation isn't always bad. Of course, but traditional curation isn't on the cards simply because of scale - StackOverflow isn't like an academic journal - and we're whining about a system that works incredibly well. Look at YouTube comments, or Yahoo Answers, and you see what a shitshow it can be when the Internet tries to have a conversation. It's a small miracle that intellectually worthwhile forums like this one can ever work. StackOverflow does a lot right. |