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I came across this question on meta recently: Make the New Answers to Old Questions real time

It got me thinking: why can't newer users see new answers to old questions alerts (10000 rep required)? As Stack Overflow becomes full of good general questions, I think the scope for good non-duplicate questions is decreasing. A lot of the good new material may well be in the updates to old questions: new ideas of how to do things, or new methods becoming available or required as languages change.

Allowing the average humble member to see the action on old questions may well allow us to be involved more in exciting progress with the various languages and could reduce the number of duplicate questions being posted.

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  • Well, they can. The new answer re-activates the question so it re-appears on the user's front page. The 10k moderator tools are however meant only for users that are trusted to with sufficient experience in moderating content. You for example need to understand that a new answer does not generate duplicate questions.
    – Hans Passant
    Commented Dec 14, 2015 at 12:05

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The New Answers to Old Questions page is targeted more for Moderation activities. Also, it is limited to 500 posts only which usually means that you may get to see answers posted within last 5-6 hours. Thus it cannot be used as a mechanism to find good new material.

Using this page, you generally try to find thanks, me too, and help me kind of answers, so you can easy get them removed from this site.

You can always see new answers and updates to old questions from the active tab as well as running a search query, for example: is:q created:..2014 lastactive:2015-12-14 will give you all questions posted before 2015 and last active today.

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