[tsgagnon]

The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers.

The issue is that by discouraging participation in the community, you end up with a repository of old questions with decent answers (that may or may not be 'decent' anymore) and fewer newer questions with even worse answers.

My experience is that using SO is basically trying to find a middle ground between an answer that is too old to be relevant, but not so new that the effect of the stagnation of the community hasn't made the answer less than helpful.

[ryandrake]

SO is a great resource if you want an answer to "How would I have done this programming thing back in 2012?" The site's aggressive closing of newly-asked questions indicates this is likely an intended outcome.

[everyone]

That is such a perfectly apt summation of modern SO. It actually made me lol.

[e_i_pi_2]

I think they need a middle ground - perhaps some way for users to submit new answers weighted by how recent they are and then have other users vote to override the previous answer

[arp242]

One of the big problems with this is that many newer answers are not good, and merely rehash the existing answers, just stated in a different (often worse) way. For example in [1] some of the newer answers just seem to repeat the top answer.

Another problem is that newer answers merely provide an alternative, that's neither better or worse. For example [2] is much newer than the existing answers, but not "better" than any of them. It merely provides an additional possible solution that's appropriate in some uses cases, but not in others.

The problem of older/outdated answers is real, but also much harder to solve than people think it is.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/35533803/660921

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/55096093/660921