[stupidcar]

The principle reason I've stopped using Stack Overflow much, which I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere, is that its content has become too dated.

Most of my questions relate to web development — how to do something in HTML/CSS/JS. When I Google, I can almost always find a related questions on Stack Overflow, but both the question and the answers are usually from a decade ago. The techniques they recommend are totally anachronistic by modern standards.

For example, search "how to vertically center a div". The top Stack Overflow result is a question from _14 years ago_, wanting to know how to do it in all browsers "including Internet Explorer 6". And the the accepted answer is a horribly convoluted hack that could be replaced with a couple of line of CSS nowadays.

[Syntaf]

This is especially true when you're working with popular frameworks that been around for awhile, e.g. rails or even django at this point.

Most accepted answers I come across for questions I have with rails are a mix of:

* Use this niche gem I created, which btw has no license and hasn't been updated in 5 years

* Use this approach which depends on rails internals from 4+ major versions ago

* Use this rails helper which has been long-deprecated and removed in modern rails

At this point I just use Phind [1] -- it's quite good at niche rails questions and I can specify that I want "Rails 7.0 or Edge" answers only so it won't give me an answer from 2011 or 2013.

[1]: https://www.phind.com/

[sedatk]

That's why SO has shot itself in the foot with its attitude towards duplicate content. Duplication would have allowed modern answers to bubble up. It's impossible to do that on SO.

[twelve40]

um... unclear? you can provide a new answer to the old question and have it bubble up via votes. Does not change other issues though.

[sedatk]

No, imagine this: you have a 14 year old question with 50 answers, all have tens of upvotes, an accepted answer from when the question was asked, many other answers similar to the accepted answer but with questionable validity from different times, and you add a new answer with zero upvotes under that pile. See the problem? No way that someone could find that without huge effort, it'll stay buried under the fold. That dynamic would discourage you from contributing that answer. The design is simply not suitable for living content.

[shagie]

> The design is simply not suitable for living content.

So, hypothetically, things like recommendations would be a bad fit for Stack Overflow as the "what is the best library to use for developing Java applications" has moved from Apache Struts to other things.

And "what is the best blog to read to get an understanding of Python" would change every year and the new posts would get buried at the bottom...

Unless you're appending "... in July of 2023" to all the questions this month.

If you want something that is more ephemeral in its nature... wouldn't Reddit or Lemmy or Discord be a better choice for that type of question?

[sedatk]

That's the thing: everything's ephemeral.

[notatoad]

relevant question i saw in the sidebar the other day, and i think the responses really show why StackOverflow isn't super useful anymore:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425822/should-an-ed...

people are trying to modify the answers to keep them up to date with modern best practices. and the result is pages of debate on whether or not it should be allowed. and at the same time, duplicates where modern answers might be allowed are being closed and kept off the site. StackOverflow is essentially a museum for any topic relating to a technology that wasn't invented this year.