While this article doesn’t really seem to be hitting what I am about to say, I think someone on HN a while back described a related phenomenon (which leads to the same issue) really well. The Internet is Balkanizing. This is hardly a new concept but they were drilling down specifically into online communities.
People are electing to not freely share information on public forums like they used to. They are retreating into discord and other services where they can put down motes and raise the draw bridges. And who can blame them? So many forums and social media sites and forums are engaging in increasingly hostile design and monetization processes, AI/LLM’s are crawling everywhere vacuuming up everything then putting them behind paywalls and ruining the original sources’ abilities to be found in search, algorithms designed to create engagement foster vitriol and controversy, the list goes on. HN is a rare exception these days.
So what happens? A bunch of people with niche interests or knowledge sets congregate into private communities and only talk to each other. Which makes it harder for new people to join. It’s a sad state of affairs if you ask me.
Yes, it's sad. On the other hand, I think it's a good thing that people share knowledge less, publicly and free of charge on the web, because there is so much exploitation going on. Big corporations obviously capitalize on the good will of people with their LLMs, but there are also others who take advantage of the ones who want to help. A lot of users seemingly expect others to solve their problems for free and don't even put any effort into asking their questions. It's a massive drain for energy and enthusiasm, some even suffer from burnout (I assume more in open-source projects than on SO but still). I rather want it to be harder to connect with people sharing the same passion "in private" than having outsider who don't contribute anything profit off of activities happening in the open. This frustratingly appears to become the main reason for corporate open source these days.
I honestly don’t agree with a lot of this. I don’t think it’s a good thing at all for people to stop publicly and freely sharing knowledge. I’ve always found the US library system to be an example of how foundational and important knowledge is: so important that it should be free to everybody.
Reddit is a pretty obvious example. While not a “traditional forum” it certainly fills that role for hundreds of millions of people. Discord is also making questionable decisions but the relative autonomy people have gives them more tolerance for it.
People are electing to not freely share information on public forums like they used to. They are retreating into discord and other services where they can put down motes and raise the draw bridges. And who can blame them? So many forums and social media sites and forums are engaging in increasingly hostile design and monetization processes, AI/LLM’s are crawling everywhere vacuuming up everything then putting them behind paywalls and ruining the original sources’ abilities to be found in search, algorithms designed to create engagement foster vitriol and controversy, the list goes on. HN is a rare exception these days.
So what happens? A bunch of people with niche interests or knowledge sets congregate into private communities and only talk to each other. Which makes it harder for new people to join. It’s a sad state of affairs if you ask me.