What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

Re:What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up? by geezerjay on Monday October 22, 2018 @01:39PM (#18276625)

> One challenge not discussed here is when an accepted and highly voted answer _used_ to be a good answer, but no longer is in later versions of whatever software/platform/library is discussed.

That's not a big problem. Questions and comments can be edited by other users, which includes adding and altering tags that reflect software versions.

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Re:What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up? by sporkland on Monday October 22, 2018 @02:12PM (#18276902)

I feel like I've been noticing that this problem on SO a lot recently, so I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.

I'll often find answers to questions which are outdated and haven't been improved. I agree they have a mechanism in place to fix it, but are users actually fixing answers en masse? SO could introduce an age out mechanism that requires an answer to be maintained semi regularly? Do they already have this today?

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Re:What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up? by InclinedPlane on Monday October 22, 2018 @02:32PM (#18277062)

Editing someone else's question or answer (comments can't be edited by others) is a very aggressive move and not something that anyone other than a handful of very experienced / high rep users are likely to do very often. And it is far from a perfect solution either.

Editing an answer substantially upsets the entire up/down vote system, as well as the comments. A better system would be something like question/answer versioning. In general it's a problem that has received far too little effort.

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Re:What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up? by geezerjay on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @04:01AM (#18281583)

> Editing someone else's question or answer (comments can't be edited by others) is a very aggressive move and not something that anyone other than a handful of very experienced / high rep users are likely to do very often.

Do you really believe that adding a tag with a version number to a post is something that can be classified as a very aggressive move, particilarly if it's an old post?

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Re:What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up? by InclinedPlane on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @12:25PM (#18284775)

Please be serious, you know that's not what is meant by editing old answers in the context of "stack overflow is more like wikipedia than anything else". The implication is wholesale change of the entire content of the answer (or question). Which fundamentally breaks how stack overflow works, and is why it's not something that happens very often.

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Re:What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up? by thaumasiotes on Monday October 22, 2018 @01:54PM (#18276761)

That's not a solution. Tags are hidden at the bottom of the answer. Accepted status and vote count are prominently highlighted. Accepted status locks the outdated answer to the top of the page regardless of whether it's valid.

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Re:What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up? by geezerjay on Monday October 22, 2018 @02:00PM (#18276819)

> That's not a solution. Tags are hidden at the bottom of the answer.

Yes, it really is. Tags are used to filter results. Stackoverflow specifically lets users run searches only on specific tags, or even exclude certain tags from the search results. As tags reflect technologies and their versions, stackoverflow enables users to run queries only on specific versions.

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Re:What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up? by umanwizard on Monday October 22, 2018 @02:12PM (#18276897)

You're thinking about this from a power-user perspective.

99% of people use Google as the search interface to stack overflow.

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Re:What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up? by hahahihi on Monday October 22, 2018 @06:52PM (#18279288)

SO search is horrible. I sometimes use it by acident then wonder wtf am i doing when the desired result doesn't show.

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Re:What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up? by dagw on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @06:47AM (#18282271)

That's not a big problem.

As someone who primarily interacts with SO via search engine results, it's one of the biggest problems with SO. The number of top voted/accepted answers that are 'wrong' in one way or another keeps going up and thus the chance of me finding the 'right' answer on SO keeps going down.

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Re:What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up? by jrochkind1 on Monday October 22, 2018 @09:59PM (#18280195)

I get outdated answers a lot of the time I'm searching. And that's when I can _recognize_ outdated answers. A lot of others posting here say the same. I guess it's possible we're an unrepresentative minority, and it doesn't effect many users.

Otherwise, how is it "not a big problem"? Is it the sort of thing where "in theory" it's not a big problem, even though in actuality it significantly effects the usefulness of the site to many people?

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Re:What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up? by raesene9 on Monday October 22, 2018 @02:26PM (#18277003)

They can be but AFAIK edits don't garner the editor points, so from a gamification perspective, people might be less inclined to edit than to put a new answer with the updated information.

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