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by imadethis 2202 days ago
My guess is a greater percentage of users find SO questions from organic searches or third party links rather than within SO itself. An obsolete flag would need to be prominent to dissuade users from following answers anyways.

I think requiring a comment or a link to a more up-to-date answer would be nice, to avoid answers being marked as obsolete without any recourse.
1 comments
lucb1e 2202 days ago
> An obsolete flag would need to be prominent

The way I (not the person you replied to) imagine this is that the post goes to the bottom and gets a red background color or is faded out, similar to how deleted answers are shown in red (if you have enough reputation; in this case everyone should be able to see these) and downvoted posts are faded out.

Edit: this is the background deleted posts currently get, for those who aren't active on the SE community: https://i.stack.imgur.com/EDAIF.png

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not2b 2202 days ago
But movement of a post to the bottom doesn't help users who find it directly via a Google search. If it was a high-quality answer in 2017 and is badly wrong now, it may still be a highly ranked URL in Google's database. So the obsolete flag would need to prominent for people who follow a direct link the answer.
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lucb1e 2202 days ago
Did you also see this part?

> and gets a red background color or is faded out

And most of the time, a newer answer is available (at least in my experience) so for those the downranking would also help.

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