posted 6 years ago
Editing old posts isn't exactly discouraged... but we have found over the years that it's not preferred.
Someone's read a post, they don't want to go back and reread the same post over and over again trying to find where the edits and updates are. Once it's read, it's read. Updating the post means missing out on the people who are already interested in what you have to say. It may grab the attention of some new people, but that's not really a good thing in a forum setting. People like to read the evolution of things by reading the whole thread. If it was a blog post, then editing with updates is an awesome thing to do because finding related posts on most people's blogs is difficult.
Adding posts to a thread gives that thread a lot of benefits. The more posts with what Google thinks of as 'quality content' (aka, not chaffy or identical to other posts in a thread), the more google lavishes love on that thread and the higher it ranks in the search. (also, I don't think Google is fond of edited content in a forum setting as it makes their bots have to reevaluate the whole page instead of just indexing new content)
Adding new posts to a thread bumps the thread on permies, so it comes to the top of the recent thread list. This helps more people see it that might have missed it before.
There are other complicated reasons why it's preferred to add more posts than editing the old ones. But those two are the major reasons.
I don't know how the inner workings of the edit button work, but it seems to stick around for a while so the poster can edit spelling and stuff, but it goes away after that as a subtle way of helping posters improve the threads by adding posts instead of editing.
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