One important question here is “do people actually have to wade through outdated posts?”.
I think the answer is basically no – the frontpage shows posts which are new and/or highly upvoted. If you start reading through a user’s archives, you’ll be starting in reverse-chronological order (newer posts first), or probably reading through their highest-karma posts.
So, the problem here is when there’s a very high karma post, which nonetheless turns out to be wrong. I think in that case, since many people read it the first time and already learned the “wrong” information, it’s actually more helpful if they see the post again, with the title edited say [Edit: This is wrong] or [Note: this is outdated], and that it begins with either a clear explanation of the update, or a link to a new post.
Otherwise, they might search for the old post, fail to find it, and then shrug and go “huh”, without realizing that the reason they couldn’t find it was that it was intentionally hidden. (And then, they’d continue believing The False Thing)
One important question here is “do people actually have to wade through outdated posts?”.
I think the answer is basically no – the frontpage shows posts which are new and/or highly upvoted. If you start reading through a user’s archives, you’ll be starting in reverse-chronological order (newer posts first), or probably reading through their highest-karma posts.
So, the problem here is when there’s a very high karma post, which nonetheless turns out to be wrong. I think in that case, since many people read it the first time and already learned the “wrong” information, it’s actually more helpful if they see the post again, with the title edited say [Edit: This is wrong] or [Note: this is outdated], and that it begins with either a clear explanation of the update, or a link to a new post.
Otherwise, they might search for the old post, fail to find it, and then shrug and go “huh”, without realizing that the reason they couldn’t find it was that it was intentionally hidden. (And then, they’d continue believing The False Thing)