The Hidden Power of Stack Overflow

> Similarly perilous is the fact that code changes very quickly. Android development practices, as an example, have changed drastically over the last few years, but the popular Stack Overflow solutions are still from 2013, meaning that budding developers might be learning through outdated solutions.

I'm a community-elected moderator on Stack Overflow, and I think this is the biggest problem - outdated answers. Stack Overflow was founded in 2008, now about 8 years ago. New and better answers that may be much better than sloppy 8 year old answer can take years to rise up to compete with the ranking of those answers, as the the default sorting mechanism is by net up/down votes.

I'd like that addressed, in a way that minimizes disruption. Accepted answers should be allowed to float in the rankings instead of being pinned at the top after a number of years. And there should be an optional "hotness" sort that primarily considers recent votes (say in the past year).

Until they do address it, the new, great answers will remain buried.

Others like to suggest Reddit's sorting method ( https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sortin... ), but that doesn't consider recency (my main concern) - and makes sense for them because voting is frozen after a period of time, whereas we can still vote on 8 year old questions on Stack Overflow - so revenge-downvoting (which, while verboten, can slip through the cracks) would have an outsized effect.

This site is being overrated by search engines. Every time I do a web search for anything related to computer programming, answers from stack overflow always appear at the top of the search results, even if they don't contain all of the search keywords, and I click and find something which doesn't answer my question.

The importance of Stack Overflow cannot be understated. It literally is underpinning every facet of development from front-end to back-end and everything else in-between. I probably visit it at least three or four times a day. Also, you regularly see core contributors and even owners of open source projects answering questions on SO, which is great. The power of Stack Overflow is only hidden from those who probably would never have a reason to use it.