A better form of moderation exists in the form of whatever they were doing before, when you could ask a question and get an answer.

At one point SE was my most used resource. As of now I haven't used SE at all for I think four years. Why would you, when so much of the site's content is outdated and the moderators enforce that situation?

"Marked as a duplicate of an outdated post" has been a common complaint since the 2000s, the only "before" was when the site was brand new.

I even checked to make sure I wasn't misremembering things - here's someone complaining about the same thing in 2011: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cm02a/you_cant...

That doesn't really show that it was a common complaint given it accrued zero Reddit agreement points.

The situation now is also much worse than it was, because answers could be two years out of date then and beyond a decade out of date now.

I quit when I realised I would be scrolling by walls of jQuery answers for the foreseeable future if I kept using the site, not worth the waste of my time.

In the old days, moderators were encouraged to update the old post. Many stopped to do that when people complain their post were edited by others, or the votes goes to wrong person because it was edited.

I was an moderator in very early days.

Afaik, this is the policy since day one. It was aimed to be a FAQ site -- not just a question-answer site.. That's why it have community answer, allow the same poster answering his own question, encourage duping, allow other people to update/correct an existing answer,etc.

Back in those days:

1) Moderator knew the subject.

2) Most questions are "frequent" enough to qualify as FAQ.

3) When duped, the old answer is less likely to be outdated (because the site was new)

That's for sure. It's been... five, six years? Since last time I visited any of those sites and found relevant information. Not for lack of trying, but it's all outdated or incomplete.

I find that weird, so maybe we're in different spaces. SO often comes up with relevant answers to my queries, and I'll click them if they seem helpful. They aren't always available and when they are they aren't always useful, but I still end up on it at least once or twice a month.