What’s even more sad is that the SO community has since consequently destroyed SO as the home for this type of info. This post would now be considered off topic as it’s “not a good format for a Q&A site”. You’d never see it happen today. Truly sad.
So with regards to the internet: The 90s and early 00s were great, then the internet became mainstream and it all just became Cable TV 2.0.
Even if a question was super similar to one that was previously asked has value in exactly that it might be phrased slightly better and be a closer match to what people were Googling.
I know most people are pessimistic that LLMs will lead to SO and the web in general to be overrun by hallucinated content and AI-training-on-AI-ouroboros, but I wonder if it might instead allow for curious people to query an endlessly patient AI assistant about exactly this kind of information. (A custom GPT perhaps?)
But almost nobody reads that.