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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

A serious problem with Stack Overflow is it allows only one right answer. As time passes, in cases when the question author haven't specified an exact version of a library in the question title (which is the case more often than it is not), better solutions become possible. And the old solution can become impossible. Yet the initially accepted answer to the question remains chosen forever.

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Sure, but there’s more than one answer listed. If the right answer isn’t clearly up to date, try a different one, or sort by recency if you want to see newer answers.

And, if the accepted answer is hopelessly outdated, suggest an edit to add that caveat so others know to skip it.

People rarely care to provide new answers to old questions yet you can be unable to post a new question because it's exactly the same as the one asked and answered a decade ago. You just need a solution relevant to the present day but no, you can't ask for it.

StackOverflow is a great resource if your question is "How would I have done this particular programming task back in 2012?"

Thinking the accepted answer is the "right" answer is a common mistake made by people who aren't aware of how Stack Overflow works.

>Accepting an answer is not meant to be a definitive and final statement indicating that the question has now been answered perfectly. It simply means that the author received an answer that worked for them personally.

https://stackoverflow.com/help/accepted-answer

Okay but is this a failure of the user or an unintuitive UX? We can't just expect to pass cognitive burden onto users in a million places. UI affordances and conventions exist for a reason.

I imagine that's what causes the confusion. The big green check is a Q&A site model ("this worked for me") but the site is intended as a documentation site ("this is how you do it"). It's a bit strange to have one question closed as a duplicate of another one that has an answer that only worked for the other question asker.

Does anybody actually pay attention to which answer has the check or not? Upvotes is by far the most useful signal.

Yet even highly upvoted (because useful and interesting) get deleted often (fortunately my points let me see the deleted) for sake of some bullshit rules.

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