Wladimir Palant

You know how Stack Overflow disallows asking for software recommendations because the answer will become outdated too soon? Guess what: other answers may not decay quite as fast but they also become outdated. And Stack Overflow isn’t really dealing with that.

I see it because I have a large number of outdated Firefox add-ons answers on my account which are completely useless today. Every now and then someone will come and attempt to make sense of these answers, sometimes even edit them. The MDN documentation related to pre-2018 Firefox add-ons has been removed, but Stack Overflow answers will still show up in search results frequently.

As Stack Overflow gets older, this problem will only grow. They better figure out a way to clean up their site. Assuming that they are interested in providing useful results rather than merely having high search rankings.

#StackOverflow

Mar 20, 2024 at 11:49amWeb
Show threadWladimir PalantMar 23, 2024

Also interesting: people who bother downvoting a thirteen years old answer. Ah, yes… 😂

#StackOverflow

Show threadtech234aMar 20, 2024
@WPalant It’s worth noting there’s https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ for software recommendations, and https://udn.realityripple.com/ is a backup of the old Firefox add on docs.
Software Recommendations Stack Exchange

Q&A for people seeking specific software recommendations

Software Recommendations Stack Exchange
Show threadWladimir PalantMar 20, 2024

@tech234a There are several backups of these docs, and I see them in the search results occasionally. None of them has the search rank of MDN however.

And: yes, I was talking about Stack Overflow, explicitly not about Stack Exchange. The rules vary throughout the network.

Show threadKumar GhoshMar 23, 2024
eagerly await enshittification or a pivot to AI 🤣