Is there a mechanism to mark an answer as out of date?

Question

In Stack Overflow generally the correct answer is often the second most upvoted answer. This is because the first answer was right but things change.

I'm already seeing here that I would like to unvote old out of date answers but can't because the answer "hasn't changed". This is true but the world did.

The easy answer would be to let people unvote. I'm sure it was prohibitied for a reason but possibly that reason doesn't really apply to a more focused community where abuse is less likely?

The more general fix might be to vote an answer as being "outdated" just as we vote to close a question.

It would be cool if the right answer was the top one.

Answer 1

There's ongoing work on Stack Overflow to better understand how we can give the community there some opportunity to indicate content that is out of date or that there may be a newer, more current solution that works better than an existing one.

While these are still in discovery and testing phases, it is definitely something that we are looking into. Hopefully, by the time you need such tooling, we will have something released but, for now, I encourage y'all to focus on growth rather than hypothetical problems you may encounter at some future date.

I'll admit to being somewhat confused at how a question can go from correct to outdated in a month. I understand that things change quickly in some of these tech stacks but that seems like a reason to edit the answer to the correct information or leave a comment saying that the answer may need an update due to recent changes... rather than tooling for outdated content.

It's one thing to look for solutions for answers that have been out of date for many years and want to mark them as obsolete but if it's only been a few weeks, get the person to edit! There's little historical value in an answer that's so new.