I have the same experience with such forums. Worse, they often clutter search results with their non-answers (yes, I know you can filter them with Kagi). These companies probably loved the idea of free labor, but 'community experts' usually don't have access to relevant internal information or developers to address many real problems.

> It had the same problem as the MS Answers forum.

I had the exact same thought when I saw the headline. For their purported use, both forums have bafflingly low signal-to-noise.

Sounds like Stack Overflow, replaced by AIs. That was discussed on HN recently.

Ubuntu forums are still somewhat useful. About half the answers are at the "turn it off and turn it on" again level, but sometimes someone with a clue answers.

“trying to up their reply count” what’s the incentive for that?

But yeah I’ve never found a decent answer to anything there, mostly just “I dunno try this” or “do that thing you said you already tried.” Good night.

>It had the same problem as the MS Answers forum.

The infamous 'Run sfc /scannow' answer comes to mind. It never fixed the issue asked

I feel like community forums for big companies trend towards this steady state of mediocrity since the forums are usually treated as a dumping ground to try and offload support obligations, giving the appearance of caring without having to add anyone new to the payroll. The people who become absorbed in these forums are in what is effectively a parasocial relationship and are ill-equipped to answer the questions because their knowledge of the product rarely goes beyond surface level, so their answers tend to fall into the "happy path" category, the ones usually available in public documentation or with a basic knowledge of computers, like how bugs caused by configuration errors introduced in past software versions can frequently be fixed by reinstalling (newer versions of) the program or that restarting can fix random bugs that accumulate the longer the system is on.

In this regard, LLMs tend to be more useful in my experience (and I suspect this is playing a part in Apple's discontinuation of the forum, though the article is cut off by a paywall so I don't know if it mentions this). They have the same pitfalls of happy paths (and hallucinations, of course), but they are quite good about digging up some random tangent from a GitHub discussion for a completely unrelated product five years ago that ends up being exactly what you need with some extra prompting.

But, 50,000 posts saying "Have you tried resetting the PRAM and resetting the SMC?" are going to be deleted from the internet!

Agreed. 90% of it was the same copy and paste (run these eight reports, uninstall and reinstall your software, then come talk to us). Like, no, I just want to know whether anyone has found a solution this problem.

My favorite: “that’s not possible by default in the ecosystem, at best you can install third party software that kinda works”

People need to read Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood to understand how to design a forum encouraging good social interactions. For what it’s worth Stack Overflow had a significantly better signal-to-noise ratio than the Apple or MS forums.

and associated subReddits.

I’ve had a lot of helpful stuff, but also, lots of useless and dated stuff.

Frankly, StackOverflow has generally been more useful, but I know that LLMs frequently mine the Apple Support Forums for their answers.