You could let old answers "fade away", unless someone votes on them and they are not one of the top n answers. Hacker News uses this technique to gray out downvoted comments so you can ignore the bad answers and focus on the good ones.

But I guess the better way would be to change the culture of SO:

• If you ask a question, you should own the answering process. Vote, comment and clarify heavy on the answers. People will see that you care and keep answering even on older questions.
• As a reader, use voting more deliberately. Especially the downvote-button is useful to push new answers above inaccurate old ones.
• Too many rules are confusing and rarely the solution to more than one specific problem. Provide a framework with few, simple rules and let the community do the rest.

Yes, I know: if we don't have all these safeguards in place, the barbarians will burn down the town, once we open up the gates. But a lot of the rules are there to make things nicer, not safer.

You could let old answers "fade away", unless someone votes on them and they are not one of the top n answers. Hacker News uses this technique to gray out downvoted comments so you can ignore the bad answers and focus on the good ones.

But I guess the better way would be to change the culture of Stack Overflow:

• If you ask a question, you should own the answering process. Vote, comment and clarify heavy on the answers. People will see that you care and keep answering even on older questions.
• As a reader, use voting more deliberately. Especially the downvote-button is useful to push new answers above inaccurate old ones.
• Too many rules are confusing and rarely the solution to more than one specific problem. Provide a framework with few, simple rules and let the community do the rest.

Yes, I know: if we don't have all these safeguards in place, the barbarians will burn down the town, once we open up the gates. But a lot of the rules are there to make things nicer, not safer.