It's only the odd random newbie that runs rampant reviving threads from 10 years ago.
Those are extreme cases.
Rampant posts can be treated as
unreasonable.
I'm more concerned about
reasonable posts – where the reasoning, before a reply, included a fair amount of thought and/or gathering of information by the author.
Related:
Valuing relevant content
Why should threads stay in the past?
I find, sometimes, intentions to devalue – to force ignorance of – user content that is sometimes
less than a year old less than four months old.
As an example, I'd like to share general troubleshooting advice under a troubleshooting topic; at the 2013 tail end of a concise, well-titled topic that spanned around thirteen months. But if I do so, that complementary advice might disappear.
The alternative:
begin a duplicate topic, orphan the original topic. For me to detract from another author, by duplicating the effort elsewhere, would be
disrespectful to the person who originally made the effort. Other readers might not treat the ignorance as disrespectful, but I would.
… Similar Threads list as configured is a waste of space …
Consider the possibility that some or all of the similar topics are old because traditional moderation has
encouraged or forced the ageing; because moderation has
discouraged or removed, from those topics, more recent replies that were relevant.
Related:
The similar threads section does save people searching. It's all good
The goodness of search results is partly dependent upon opening posters using good, focused, self-explanatory subject lines (titles).
Side note: as XenForo does not allow any new reply to have a subject line, so I wonder whether goodness/relevance of search results – from engines within and beyond the macrumors.com domain – will decrease, over time. If you'd like to discuss that point, please quote it under MacRumors Forums Theme Change and New Platform (I have more to add, but it's off-topic).