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Someone may have answered a question and the external resources they referenced are no longer available. In this case I do not believe they deserve a down vote but I also don't like coming to a page looking for an answer to just find out it is no longer relevant.

The other use case I could think of is when you have significant technological changes and the suggestions are out of date. Someone coming to look for an answer might not know that the answer is out of date and trust the suggestions. It would be nice to have a flag saying that it was out of date.

This could also maybe feed into search optimizations so that out of date or now broken answers do not get top hits.

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  • When I think of obsolete that to me just talks to the problem of out of date version. Where as this could be for new tech with now broken links.
    – Swazimodo
    Commented Sep 28, 2018 at 16:52
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    If an answer is nothing but a link, it shouldn't be an answer. If an answer is for an older version, and is more than a link, it can still be a decent answer for anyone using that version.
    – fbueckert
    Commented Sep 28, 2018 at 17:08
  • Even if a link is broken, this does not mean that a answer cannot be helpful for someone else. Often the content can still be accessed in the wayback machine or simply knowing the filename allows to find it's new place or a copy someone else posted.
    – aloneprism
    Commented Sep 28, 2018 at 17:28

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If I see an answer which is out of date or with a broken link then I make a comment to that effect.

Since the answer in its current state is no longer useful or not as useful as it could be I will also often downvote it.

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