[HN Gopher] Outdated Answers: accepted answer is now unpinned on...
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Outdated Answers: accepted answer is now unpinned on Stack Overflow
Author : akeck
Score : 140 points
Date : 2021-09-15 13:48 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (meta.stackoverflow.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (meta.stackoverflow.com)
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Hopefully all of the JavaScript questions on how to do things
| won't have all the top answers be how to do them in jQuery now.
| tzs wrote:
| The biggest problem I tend to hit nowadays with Stack Overflow
| (and other Stack Exchange sites) is when someone says that while
| doing $X they ran into problem $Y and want help with $Y, and
| _none_ of the answers tell how to do $Y. They _all_ say that for
| doing $X a better approach is to do $Z instead of $Y.
|
| That's great for the person who asked the question, because
| presumably doing $X that they actually care about.
|
| But I'm not there because I'm doing $X. I'm doing something
| totally different that does actually need $Y.
|
| I've had times where I've found a dozen different SO questions
| asking about how to do $Y and ever damned answer to every damned
| one of them was a "you don't need $Y for what you are doing...do
| this instead" answer.
| euler2100 wrote:
| Feel you, it's infuriating and a waste of time to even open the
| link to such questions just to find those kind of answers.
| antifa wrote:
| Also that I don't have the karma to fix anything, and on
| other websites it's not even possible for community
| corrections.
| mythz wrote:
| Makes sense, the accepted answer is 1 persons vote (the asker)
| which was given more prominence over everybody else's votes.
| emrah wrote:
| If they are not going to pin the accepted answer to the top, do
| they even need an "accepted answer" feature any more?
|
| I guess it provides closure that a question is "done" so it's
| still useful.
|
| Maybe they need a different method to accept answers, also based
| on votes?
| junon wrote:
| Yes. Having your answer marked as the accepted answer gives you
| rep. Rep is the lifeblood of the platform.
|
| If you take away accepted answers, then the 10 rep reward
| (might be more now) goes away, which means incentive to answer
| potentially low-popularity question (note, not _low-quality_ ,
| just those that will not be seen often) will diminish and thus
| it'll lead to people writing highly senationalized/clickbait-ey
| questions, even further ruining the content quality of the site
| (something SO has been struggling with the last several years).
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| What would the difference be if you were awarded points to
| the person who was excepted, but didn't necessarily show the
| rest of the users who that was?
|
| If anything they have to be at least a portion of people who
| were up vote the excepted answer over better answers, just
| because it has the checkmark. Just like if a comment section
| shows up or downvotes somehow, they can be intended to
| influence groupthink.
|
| _EDIT: Answered with two good comments below this, no need
| for me to address them separately._
| dspillett wrote:
| _> What would the difference be if you were awarded points
| to the person who was excepted, but didn't necessarily show
| the rest of the users who that was?_
|
| People might then post more answers that are not needed,
| possibly only varying in a minor detail to the accepted
| answer in which case they should instead add that detail as
| a comment or (if they have sufficient rep) a direct edit to
| the answer.
| junon wrote:
| Because you bump into the problem of transparency. SO has
| always had a transparency-first attitude - that is, until
| the new owner came along.
| asicsp wrote:
| > _There was a whopping 61.6% increase in users copying from the
| top answer when the accepted answer was unpinned and the highest-
| scoring answer was first in the list of answers._
|
| I hope the users will still at least be curious about the
| accepted answer in such cases, popularity doesn't always mean it
| is better. But overall, I think this change is better.
| dtech wrote:
| As SO is aging, the most popular answer is almost always the
| better one for answers from before ~2014.
| jabo wrote:
| I asked a question about Redis back in 2010 and it's now a
| popular question that keeps getting upvotes to this day.
|
| I accepted one of the answers in 2010, but then over the years
| after gaining more experience in Redis myself (painfully might I
| add) I later realized that a more recent answer actually is a
| better solution.
|
| So I went in recently and changed the accepted answer to the more
| recent and better one.
|
| I felt weird about doing this given that rep points are involved,
| but between having someone lose rep points vs a larger group of
| people potentially going down a sub-optimal path, I chose the
| former. Anyone else feel weird about this?
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I felt weird about doing this given that rep points are
| involved, but between having someone lose rep points vs a
| larger group of people potentially going down a sub-optimal
| path, I chose the former. Anyone else feel weird about this?
|
| Should rep points decay over time? Or accrue for the duration
| an answer is still relevant (for low level questions
| especially, the best answer might stay so forever if dealing
| with a specific CPU architecture for instance).
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Don't they get points for having the accepted answer on a
| popular viewed question? So they were getting points for
| several years?
|
| Asking, as not totally up to date on Stack Overflow's points
| awarding algo.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Yes, points are accrued over time and never go away unless
| the source of the points (i.e. upvotes) goes away.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| so in that case despite having a solution that was lesser
| than the other solution they accrued a lot of points over
| time? Sounds like they would have nothing to feel sore
| about.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I's only 2 points for an accepted answer, don't worry about it.
| b3morales wrote:
| The _recipient_ of the accept mark gets 15. It 's 2 for the
| awarder.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| 15 is nothing though.
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| As the saying goes, "A billion here, a billion there, and
| pretty soon you're talking real money."
| mrpf1ster wrote:
| These are fake internet points, I don't think that warrants
| potentially misleading future developers.
| joshgrib wrote:
| I definitely overall agree, but on StackOverflow they aren't
| just fake internet points - they give you real privileges on
| the site
| hatchnyc wrote:
| StackOverflow points are quite valuable IMHO.
|
| I haven't used the site in almost a decade, but I posted a
| few extremely valuable answers back around 2010 about stuff
| like how to redirect a request or round a number in SQL (/s),
| and over the decade these stupid answers have netted me
| thousands of points, keeping me in the top few % of site
| users. As the quality has fallen off and the main focus has
| shifted from programming to meta-pedantry I've completely
| stopped using the site aside from what links Google takes me
| to.
|
| The points however, are extremely valuable still. Whenever I
| have a tricky problem, I can post a question with a large
| bounty and dozens of strangers from around the world will
| spend countless hours of their time doing research and
| writing up multi-page solutions completely for free. Of
| course half the time the act of writing out the question
| makes the answer obvious, but still.
|
| Having said that, I still think the quality of answers was
| better 10 years ago than it is today even with a bounty.
| mcguire wrote:
| OMG! Those fake internet points mean people's jobs!!!!
|
| Sorry. I feel better now.
| lamontcg wrote:
| My most highly upvoted answer on SO is something from 10 years
| ago that I just updated with an addendum that nobody should
| listen to anything I had to say and should go with the other
| answers.
| TillE wrote:
| This is great. There are so, so many instances I've found just in
| the past couple months where a question would have an extremely
| outdated (or just plain bad to begin with) accepted answer, with
| a good answer that has more votes just below it.
|
| That and dumb/irrelevant/misguided comments have been my biggest
| annoyances as a passive user of SO.
| bachmeier wrote:
| This is _possibly_ a move in the right direction. The problem, as
| I have learned, is that SO is 100% useless (not 99%, actually
| 100%) when trying to learn anything related to the web. Any
| question I as a beginner have is already answered, and the answer
| is almost certainly wrong or suboptimal.
|
| Thankfully there are lots of other good resources, most notably
| MDN.
|
| The only solution I see is to give web questions a lifetime of
| something like two years.
| Aulig wrote:
| I very much disagree with SO being useless. If you find an
| answer that is quite old, why don't you just scroll down to see
| if there's a more recent one?
|
| I usually find it quite easy to evaluate which of the two is
| the better answer then.
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| In most case, you'll also find a highly upvoted comment just
| below the old answer pointing to the more accurate/recent
| one.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > If you find an answer that is quite old, why don't you just
| scroll down to see if there's a more recent one?
|
| Why are you assuming I don't do that?
|
| Rather than spending my time doing that, why not go to an
| authoritative, updated source like MDN to begin with?
| gardnr wrote:
| Because most of HN users also make their bread and butter
| by copy pasting from SO. The Venn diagram is almost a
| circle.
| throwaway192874 wrote:
| I see you're an economics professor with an interest in
| computation, and perhaps learning to program? Awesome!
|
| Ask any experienced programmer how often they use
| StackOverflow, and they'll tell you daily. It's an invaluable
| resource to our community and we often wonder how we got along
| without it before.
|
| In particular, it's great for highly specific questions about
| very niche things. Like, with this version of this library and
| in this stack, this very odd behavior is happening and I only
| see it in IE8, what could it be? That's not something you'll
| find and answer for on MDN. MDN is a fantastic reference
| resource when you know what you're looking for and need the
| details, but it's not a Q&A platform about anything.
|
| SO is not perfect, sometimes you have to dig for the right
| information (something this change is trying to improve), and
| perhaps it's not ideal for beginners, but I wouldn't want to
| live in a world without something like StackOverflow, and would
| be significantly less productive
| antman wrote:
| Great, but also add a time decay factor to penalizw answers tgat
| have not been upvoted recently to mitigate the graveyard effect.
| mbostleman wrote:
| It's pretty simple really. The accepted answer was chosen by a
| single person. Not only might it not be good, it's entirely
| possible that it's not even right. Statistically the one with the
| most upvotes will inevitably not only be the best, but is also
| the most likely to be right. And hopefully it can even self-
| adjust over time. The whole idea of an OP "accepted" answer is a
| sketchy feature from the start.
| dgritsko wrote:
| > The whole idea of an OP "accepted" answer is a sketchy
| feature from the start.
|
| I think that's highly dependent on the type of question being
| asked. For questions where a person had a specific problem,
| accepting the answer was a way to indicate "yes, this fixed my
| problem" - and by definition, only the OP can decide that.
|
| Now that doesn't quite fit for "best practice" questions where
| the answers might evolve over time (hence the change being
| discussed here), but the "accept" mechanism doesn't
| discriminate.
| [deleted]
| fencepost wrote:
| Seems like it would be not unreasonable to have some sort of
| aging built in. Since I suspect reputation is a major factor
| there utilize all votes for rep, but for answer relevance
| gradually reduce the impact of votes based on their age. There'd
| probably need to be a way to mark 'evergreen' or perhaps 'stable'
| answers where that decay would be slower, or simply allow people
| to (with limits?) go back and refresh their votes on articles.
|
| Separating historical reputation from answer relevance ranking
| would be an attempt to reduce the perceived value to individuals
| of tampering with scores - refreshing a vote on an answer
| wouldn't impact overall reputation.
| junon wrote:
| We've been asking for this for _years_.
|
| > There was a 43.6% decrease in users copying from the accepted
| answer when the highest-scored answer was shown first.
|
| Good. As much as I hate that people copy and paste without
| reading through code and understanding it, if they're going to
| it, I'd rather them not copy potentially insecure stuff.
|
| For those who don't fully understand - the "accepted" answer (the
| one that helped the poster of the question, the OP) used to be
| shown even before an answer that was upvoted more than it - even
| in cases where the spread is hundreds or even thousands of rep.
|
| The problem with this is that a single person (the OP) got to
| dictate which answer on a potentially frequently viewed question
| got the most attention, and by proxy, which code got copy/pasted
| the most.
|
| This, despite another answer probably having better, more secure,
| more thoughtful, or more performant code as reflected by the
| hundreds of people that upvoted it.
| bmhin wrote:
| Another side effect was that a question that might have had a
| perfectly fine answer that was accepted back when the question
| was posed in 2010, now might be very much not the right
| approach. I feel like I frequently see questions where down in
| the other answers are multiple answers posted in the
| intervening years with much simpler and more readable answers.
| Or even if there isn't some new way of performing the solution,
| there might just be a reason why it's become the wrong question
| in and of itself and an explanation for why this is the wrong
| road nowadays is provided.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is a very important point - many questions on SO that
| come up first in Google results are VERY old, and the
| accepted answer may no longer apply with later versions of
| whatever is being asked about, and the original poster may be
| long gone or even dead.
| ChrisSD wrote:
| But preserving the old solution is also important.
| Sometimes we have to maintain old versions so it's very
| helpful to be able to look up answer from that time.
| lamontcg wrote:
| That information should appear towards the bottom of the
| answers, not the top.
|
| There's a defacto curation of SO answers now based on
| oldest answer on top, which is almost backwards. Which is
| a flaw of voting systems.
|
| Reddit has an analogous problem where the first person to
| make an widely accessible quip gets voted straight to the
| top, with generally a trainwreck of low effort chuckles
| and puns hanging off of that. If you want lots of reddit
| comment karma you can easily just read some popular
| subreddit by 'new' and make those kinds of low effort /
| accessible comments.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I wish SO would expire questions. It would go a long way
| toward making sure the answers that come up in search are
| current. Popular questions would get asked again
| organically in short order.
|
| It would mess with the way they do points, but so what? The
| goal is to be the best resource for developers; the point
| system should just be a tool for doing that.
|
| They would not have to actually delete old questions, just
| kill their search rank so newer questions take precedence.
| Can be done by assigning a new URL and noindexing the
| redirect from the old one.
| willvarfar wrote:
| Or google and other search engines, which probably
| special case SO already, could weigh the age of the
| questions and answers when ranking results.
| OJFord wrote:
| They probably do? Just like for news articles?
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| StackOverflow built itself as a Question and Answer site and
| you can see the results of that original concept.
|
| Had they instead built themselves as a symptom and treatment
| website, much of the problems that they have had would have
| gone away.
|
| The original asker should not have nearly as much power as they
| do. Duplicates would instead be other symptoms. If you had a
| cough 5 years ago, come March of last year the cure would have
| changed for the same symptoms. But since SO is a question site,
| they would not have responded to such.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| Maybe just my impression, but I usually find the accepted answer
| more accurate than the top upvoted answer. Usually the accepted
| answer captures a more nuanced understanding of the original
| question, even if it isn't necessarily as clear and straight-
| forward as the top upvoted answer. Certainly not always the case,
| maybe like a 55% thing
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I see this as further evidence that Stack Overflow is dead.
| Questions have grown old; answers refer to libraries and language
| features that are deprecated; it is almost impossible to remedy
| the situation, because new related questions are closed as
| duplicates, and new answers to old questions will never bubble to
| the top. The best you can do is add cautionary comments to
| outdated answers.
| tarr11 wrote:
| This kind of comment reminds me of "The Second Coming" by
| William Butler Yeats.
|
| https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| There are further ways to liven things up. A good one would be
| to decay scores over time, in an exponential fashion. It's a
| far more complicated way to rank results, because you have to
| keep track of a distribution of upvotes in time, but it would
| stop skewing things so heavily toward "incumbent" answers.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Yes, there are good ways to do it from the administrators'
| side, and your idea is excellent. I meant that from the
| users' perspective, cautionary comments are about the best
| you can do.
| psychometry wrote:
| This is probably like what reddit does with its "best" sort
| option or other sites do with "popular"/"hot"/etc.
| Arnavion wrote:
| >and new answers to old questions will never bubble to the top.
| The best you can do is add cautionary comments to outdated
| answers.
|
| I always check answers for such cautionary comments. And if
| they point to another answer, I upvote it and downvote the
| original. So I'm not sure "never" is accurate such that SO
| should be considered "dead".
| dragontamer wrote:
| Communities grow and shrink over time. Stack Overflow hasn't
| figured out a good way to deal with this.
|
| There are two conflicting purposes going on here: the need for
| archival, and the need for discussion. Over the course of 10
| years, its clear that some information should be archived,
| while other material should be rediscussed and reupped.
|
| I'll plug my "idea" again (just an idea guy, lol). Which is
| that question/answer sites need to have an "epoch period" of
| sorts. Back in the 90s, I used to play a browser-based MMO game
| called Utopia (and its sister game: Earth 2025). Every 6
| months, the scoreboard would be archived and the game reset.
|
| The idea is: players come and go. You need a time for players
| to "leave" (ex: retire for a season, or permanently). But you
| also want to keep connected players together (ex: a kingdom of
| 20 players may have become friends, so you want to keep those
| social connections).
|
| Resetting the game from scratch every few months meant that all
| players were nominally on equal grounds. It also allowed the
| game to change its rules and rebalance from update to update
| (maybe some strategies were too strong, or too weak).
|
| Q&A sites would benefit from this. If a question is renewed in
| a later epoch / season, maybe its truly different than the
| historical answer from 5 years ago.
|
| ------
|
| StackOverflow also treated its upvotes/downvotes like a game. I
| am convinced that this causes long-term issues in the
| community. Resetting these points back from scratch (with maybe
| historical notes on former points) would go a long way towards
| determining who is or isn't active and at which times. (Ex:
| someone may have been highly active from 2014 to 2016, and the
| archives would indicate it. But that doesn't necessarily mean
| that they're well-versed in 2020-2021 "season" rules or
| culture)
| amrox wrote:
| Many online games have a season model now, and SO at least
| partially gamifies developer Q&A, so this tracks.
| kreddor wrote:
| Completely off-topic, but I would love a modern version of
| Utopia that doesn't suck :)
| joeax wrote:
| One of my peeves has always been the accepted answer is one of
| those "That's not possible" type answers, only to become possible
| later on with a newer release.
| nicoburns wrote:
| This is a really positive change. There are a lot of abandoned
| questions where the accepted answer was correct at the time it
| was accepted but is no longer correct. This allows the community
| to correct that rather than relying on the question asker.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I like the change, but does it make the "solution" pin / check
| mark worth anything at all now?
|
| Does it matter to me that - at the time they saw it - the OP
| liked this solution? There has always been a lot of grey area
| there. I guess it's nice to award some points to whoever OP
| liked, but now I'm wondering if they need to show it at all.
|
| EDIT: Changed my mind and agree with lower comments. I still
| think there is ofcourse a subjectivity to "what answer this guy
| liked at this time", but everyone had good points.
| praash wrote:
| Accepting a specific solution adds clarity against ambiguous
| questions and sidetracked answers. A resolved question can
| then be promoted to users searching for solutions.
| b3morales wrote:
| If the accepted answer is also the one with the highest
| score, it will still be at the top. If it's not, then that's
| maybe a signal to read the question and answers more
| carefully before using them.
| enobrev wrote:
| I think the accepted answer is still an important signal.
| I've seen cases where the highest voted answer does not
| necessarily respond to some nuance in the original question.
| It may be an overall better approach to the general matter,
| or make an important point about it, but not necessarily an
| answer to the specific question as asked (and when asked).
| codesections wrote:
| > We looked at users who copied all or part of any answer, or
| users who took any voting action (upvote, downvote, etc.) on any
| answer.
|
| Huh, I probably should have realized it, but the idea that Stack
| Overflow was tracking whether I copy an answer had never occurred
| to me.
|
| (Mostly joking, I hope: I guess they could monitize that info for
| Stack Overflow Jobs, by certifying that a candidate has a low
| rate of copying answers!)
| donarb wrote:
| Tracking user's interactions with the site (or any site out
| there) doesn't have to be related to monetization. It could
| actually be part of SO's mission to make the site better and
| more useful to its users.
| handrous wrote:
| Lots of sites track your _mouse movements_ and key log you.
|
| Letting Javascript initiate connections was a huge mistake.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| Granted, it was an April Fools joke:
|
| https://twitter.com/ptkaster/status/1377427814052335618?lang...
|
| But it made me realize the code to track copy is there.
| fabian2k wrote:
| That was actually added for an April's fool joke that
| pretendend that you only had a limited number of copy/pastes. I
| assume they simply reused that code for this experiment.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| They need to move old-stuff to legacy-stack. (:
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Because of this the top answer to one of my questions is actually
| a comment. I ask how to do something. The top answer starts by
| asking "does it matter?", argues about the necessity of doing it
| and concludes that yeah I totally can do it if I really really
| want to. Without specifying how. Moderators agreed it wasn't an
| answer but left it there as a "frame challenge".
|
| This copy paste metric may be valid on stackoverflow itself but
| other stackexchange sites are different. Many have nothing to do
| with code.
| TillE wrote:
| Yeah that stuff is annoying. It's not wrong to ask for
| clarification when the question is lacking context, but there
| are a lot of cases where people really want to answer a
| different question than what was asked.
|
| I remember one question about std::bitset using 8 bytes when it
| could use 1 byte, and answerers basically laughed at being
| concerned over 7 bytes, like they'd never considered that you
| might quite reasonably be using millions of them.
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