[Theodores]

Stack Overflow has a problem of outdated answers written ten years ago by people wanting to collect experience points.

Technology moves on and those early answers are simply no good. Recently I decided to learn a few things from first principles - reading the specs. If I then try to put a half decent answer on SO then it will be answer 97, 3563 upvotes behind the 'right answer'.

New person who comes along isn't going to get to my detailed answer on page 5, the one that points out how technology has moved on and why the winning answers are not what you needed. They just need to deliver the deliverables and the first answer will suffice. They will take it and add another plus to the upvotes.

You can't win, the odds are stacked in favour of the mediocre. This wasn't always the way with Stack Overflow, in fact it replaced forums where the same problem existed but only to stall the nonsense for a few years, we are back to peak nonsense again.

I think time is ripe for Stack Overflow to be usurped, nothing against the site which I have so loved over the years, but even mySpace had to be replaced by Facebook.

[baroffoos]

Stack overflow doesn't need to be replaced they just need to find a way of filtering out answers that are no good anymore which is actually a bit of a hard task because many ancient answers about vim and git are still perfectly valid.

Maybe some kind of super downvote for outdated questions that is strictly moderated so it isn't abused.

[umanwizard]

I completely agree that this is a serious problem. But I’m not sure how it could be solved, and I still think vendors providing docs, and easily readable source code for when the docs fail, is a necessary complement to any crowd-sourced model, be it forums, SO, or anything you might imagine replacing SO with.

[jimmaswell]

This is basically never been the case for me. Once or twice I got an answer that suggested a deprecated API call, which I could then just google the replacement for and use that. I don't have any complaint about StackOverflow personally.

[Theodores]

If you are on the bleeding edge of the new shiny then you won't have this problem that I am seeing. But the guy supporting your code in five years time might.

To some extent the problem depends on how new and shiny your stuff is.

[jimmaswell]

My experience has been the same ranging from questions about C, C#, JS, Python, and many others.