the sense of community on the internet from 1995 to 2010 was incredible. industry devs running into tricky situations and just asking for help on irc, newsgroups like comp.lang.*, then forums, places like expert-sexchange and gamedev.net - the people that helped were like heroes and mentors and the urge to pay it forward was real and strong. stackoverflow was cool when it first launched - then something happened to it, like someone unleashed a hundred thousand pent up devs from an underground cave where they had been torturing them with mind games where they're forced to sabotage each other and stuff like collaboration and encouragement was punished - all rushed in at once like a lethal injection and the sense of community was soon dead

I suspect that a lot of the stuff everyone recognizes as AI-isms/writing tics - is actually just the way genX'ers sounded when they were explaining things to strangers on the internet