The problem with this, and why SO’s downfall was completely self-inflicted, is that the correct answer from 2013 is only occasionally still the correct answer in 2018. There are a lot of other issues with SO’s general moderation policy but well and truly it was as idiotic and myopic as it was toxic.

They treated subjective questions about programming methods as if they were universal constants. It was completely antithetical to the actual pursuit of applied knowledge, or collecting and discussing best practices and patterns of software design. And it was painfully obvious for years this was as a huge problem, well before LLMs.

That said, I will say after being traumatized by having my threads repeatedly closed, I got so good at boiling down my problem to minimal reproducible examples that I almost never needed to actually post, because I’d solve it myself along the way.

So I guess it was great for training me to be a good engineer in the abstract sense. but absolutely shit at fostering any community or knowledge base.

> that the correct answer from 2013 is only occasionally still the correct answer in 2018

Exactly! They should have added proper structuring to questions/replies so that it could specifically apply for Language/library version X. Later, such a question could be answered again (either by proving it's still correct for version X+1, or by giving a new answer) - that way people wouldn't have to look at a new reply with 2 votes vs an older, possibly outdated one with 100 and make a decision which to prefer.