The difficulty of asking questions on forums and StackOverflow drove people to reddit. The same forces of scale and moderation stressed reddit, so niche communities moved to private Discords. At every step information became more proprietary and less discoverable.
In 2023 all existing web content was scraped to bring about modern LLMs. AI finally allowed users to get the answer to any question with infinite patience, searching and synthesizing all possible public information. Google's AI answers atop search results were at first useless, but eventually got good enough to prevent you ever having to click on a hyperlink.
The result is a one-way interaction in which information value is extracted, but never added back into to the system.
The only way for someone passionate to supply the world valuable information about some hobby like vintage sewing machines is to willfully go back to r slash sewing machine enthusiasts and do eternal battle with moderators seeking to be the king of their little hill on one side and the onslaught of competing AI/normie slop on the other.
Taking this off private because it made me so fucking angry