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by rcar
2145 days ago
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Part of the difficulty SO faces is that there's sort of two similar but distinct problems that it's meant to solve, and as such there is no one "community". It's simultaneously a place to ask programming questions and get answers to them, and it's a repository of commonly asked programming questions with curated answers. The heavily engaged section of the community represented by your linked thread tends to focus on the latter goal, and the things they do to benefit the site for it (e.g., the aggressive closed-as-duplicate patrol) tend to be the things that makes it a hostile feeling place for the "long tail" community of new question askers and occasional answerers. |
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Such an elevation may require some small edits. This adds all sorts of benefits:
1. Given that it is now clear that the question is moving from 'this answers the question asked by the original poster' to 'this is now like a blog post, generally useful information that should score highly on google', it is completely fine to edit the question and turn it into something that no longer entirely matches the original asker. I'd even go so far as to clone the question, and leave the real question unmolested.
2. The question (or, better yet, an answer) can be marked as obsoleted or outdated. There are huge swaths of questions on SO that have a ton of votes and an answer that was fantastic in the past, but is now flat out misleading or wrong, but it seems both onerous to begin the path of finding a few thousand people to downvote it, as well as 'mean' to the poster of that answer, and tricky for the historic purposes of the internet (imagine a fix in some source code has a comment that links to this answer!) - and for similar reasons, editing the answer so that it is nothing like the original answer is also flat out bizarre. It'd be so much better if it was possible to vote an answer as 'obsolete' or 'outdated'. But that doesn't work if SO is at odds with itself and at once a repo of common questions AND a specific question->specific answer forum.
3. Given that an SO community now has a presumably much smaller set of questions-with-answers that have been elevated to 'commonly asked question with great curated answers', they can 'police' their fiefdom of curated general knowledge vastly better, with mods and random passersby invited to ocassionally inspect one of these curated answers and see if it still seems useful, applicable, and correct in the current day and age. It also becomes far more feasible to browse through the entirety of the curated questions list.