What are peoples predictions for the future of technical forums in a post LLM world?
For non specific and more general questions, given the popular crawler search engines are already IMHO since I'm already witnessing very weak search engine responses to censor for unknown reasons, there could be stranger questions eventually arrive in help forums. [I wanted a quick reference rather than dig though a couple of boxes of my own books, a time line of human evolution, a tree with rough period dates - I was still banging at the keyboard 10 or 15 minutes later in frustration - this stuff is out on the web, well it used to be.]
Technical problems solved in help forums is usually more specific due to same underlying problems and shotgun solutions, no doubt a LLM would parrot information derived from various forums. However often problems are not that clear and thus it'll be a different boat, and it'll depend on if the problem is straight forward and dead simple and the bulk of solutions are the same, if the problem has been answered incorrectly a few hundred times ... or wrong BS has been purposely flooded onto the net for LLMs to find. Ultimately people will probably arrive asking for help when things are muddied by the things the LLM told them to try. I used to contribute quite a lot back in 2002/3 at computing.net ... so many people arrived there needing help with 98 ... to myself it was clear they'd used a help book, but used an old msdos system floppy to run the sys command ... the cookie cutter experts would scream every time I suggested the correct method to get their system closer to at least of all booting ... most (near all) listened instead to the experts and ended up reinstalling from scratch ... the forum was going down the path of a points system and I left -- felt a bit for those who I used to help out since I used to also service the hard to find drivers requests at the time.