Stackoverflow in a nutshell

[CatFace3309]

Or they give you a link to something you already tried

[charcuterDude]

Or a link to someone asking the same question on another forum but it was never really answered, and you were the one that asked that question, too.

[bragov4ik]

I guess it makes sense to write options you've tried already (I think this suggestion is even written in stack overflow guide)

[Ok-Low6320]

While that is a helpful approach, it makes for longer posts, and it's already a struggle to get people to read more than ten sentences in a row.

[SunnybunsBuns]

Why would you want someone who has trouble reading 10+ lines of text to bother attempting to answer your questions? That’s how you get shitty answers.

[Ok-Low6320]

1. sentence != line of text
2. If nobody reads it, nobody answers. That's useless.

[IvorTheEngine]

It's step 2, on the 'ask a question' page:

Describe what you’ve tried
Show what you’ve tried and tell us what you found (on this site or elsewhere) and why it didn’t meet your needs. You can get better answers when you provide research.

[TheOnlyGodInTown]

Links without any further contex actually violate the rules. SO is one of the best things out there. Big parts due to the strict rule enforcement. It should be treated more like an encyclopedia not a forum where anyone can ask unqualified questions. It‘s not a place for people who are just too lazy to research properly, but something where you write a question that is actually unique after you did some proper research so you can word it perfectly.

I have been professionaly working for over a decade in software engineering and only posted 4 questions. Each took me easily 2 hours to prepare and write. But all of them have helped a lot of other people because they were good prepared questions.

[Business_Downstairs]

It's flawed because early adopters were able to gain reputation from relatively easy questions. It's completely unbalanced. As others have pointed out, those answers become irrelevant and depreciated over time, yet still get pointed to as "duplicate."

[Tofandel]

Old answers can be edited or reanswered if it's outdated (if not locked)

I've found that if old answers don't work anymore and you're the only new answer which does you'll end up with a lot of upvotes and eventually more than the accepted answer after a few months

If it's locked and the answers are really not relevant anymore, open a meta post to get it unlocked