I appreciate the mechanisms which help bring attention to new answers to old questions - front page sorting, and the moderation tool explicitly designed for it. But I wonder if we can do more. I'm particularly interested in addressing answers whose validity has changed. In the worst case, they were correct when they were posted, but no longer are, so they mislead all the current users who find their way to them looking for an answer. More benignly, perhaps the best answer was good, but slightly flawed.
At this point, a helpful user may post a new answer, which is much better than existing upvoted and accepted answers. It can be difficult to overcome that momentum. What if the default sorting method took this into account? A naive suggestion: if a new answer has a large positive vote velocity, and an old answer has a negative vote velocity, perhaps the default sorting should place the new answer above the old answer. This could help make new answers visible to users who need a correct answer, and also help garner more votes to increase the confidence of the sorting decision.
I know this would be a fairly low-impact change, but nothing is permanent, and I'm afraid of answers with 100 upvotes being pinned at the top for years after they've become obsolete.
Edit: I would welcome other proposals that accomplish the same goal - my naive suggestion wasn't intended to be a complete solution, just one thing that a better sorting method would do.
