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The main problem is they tried to be a middle way between a forum and a wiki with only correct answer (even if as some other have said, they never wanted to acknowledge that especially in programming the answer is correct or good or valid only for a certain amount of time most often than not)

What we actually need:

- the owner of the question must be the only one capable to say if an answer is good or not for his question

- no other user must be able to modify the question of the owner even if they think it is badly explained. They can always suggest modifies but the owner can decide if to accept them or not

- the moderators can try to suggest "hey we think this is a duplicate of that" but the owner must be the one to accept or reject it. Even if he says "I just want a more current answer, the one you linked is 4 yo" the moderators must accept his decision and keep the question open

- moderators must act aggressively against people (and other moderators) saying things like "this sound like some homework" or "you better use technology y instead of x" or similar

- answers older than a few years should have a visible flag on them signaling that probably that answer is not anymore the best possible one and to be careful using it and, if it doesn't work anymore, to open a new question tagging the old one




SO works in an environment where not all users are well meaning




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