How should major revisions of answers been dealt with?

Question

I recently had quite a funny case with this answer that I had written. I wrote an answer that was technically wrong. Overnight, the question hit the HNQ, and subsequently got lots of attention and upvotes.

When I had returned, there were several comments, indicating that I was indeed wrong. I double-checked, since the question had received more attention, and corrected the answer.

Schroeder raised a valid point after the revision was done, in that the answer is now a completely different one, and it could be seen as a bait-and-switch. He suggested to delete my old answer, which I could not do, as it had been accepted already.

So what is the procedure for "major revisions" to answers, especially those who got accepted already?

Answer 1

I suggest the other side in that it's a good faith answer and editing it is close enough to staying in the bounds of the intent for the tools you've got. On the moderator side, I'm now getting a lot more flags for "not an answer" on the old one.

I suppose you can make a new one and flag the old one to be removed as we can certainly override the accepted answer flag, but I discourage that even more when thinking of an answer where the world has changed several years later and it's worth going back to edit to reflect the new reality... so whether hours later when you learned something more correct, or years later when more correct has moved, I'd edit it. We have other tools for dealing with somebody who intentionally makes a bad faith bait and switch.

The current net result is the best course of action I could see of the current state of things is to remove your old answer. I'm open to further discussion, but as moderators action taken is part of the game.

Answer 2

Create a second answer. There is nothing wrong with submitting more than one answer to the same question, if they take fundamentally different approaches with no broad overlap or commonality. Then, the OP could choose one or the other approach. I have rarely done this, but I have done at least once (edit: on StackOverflow)

If your old answer is technically incorrect, then generally I'd try to salvage it if possible by fixing it up, but if it's so fundamentally wrong that you couldn't make it correct without changing its direction fundamentally, I'd just delete it and work on the new answer instead.

At time of writing this, you replaced your old answer with some placeholder text saying the answer that had been there was not correct. I can see the intention behind this, but it's left an "answer" that isn't actually an answer, which will need to be deleted.

Consider someone stumbling upon the question in 12 months' time from now, they will just need the best answer, they won't need to know the story behind what happened to an older answer that's not there anymore.