TLDR: What I’m noticing is that it is getting harder and harder to get answers by searching in the internet. Let’s choose public groups and websites over closed groups behind a username and password
My first car was a VW Beatle 1977. I believe that’s were my “passion” to understand and fix cars started. It actually started because I didn’t have much money and a 30 years old car is likely to fail at some point. 😬
For any brand or car imaginable, we would have a public forums with people asking questions and helping each other. It was lovely. “In the olds days… 😆“. I recently bought a Mahindra Pik Up, it’s not the most popular truck in NZ, and it was not straight forward to find help searching online or asking AI.
What is my view?
All these forums have now moved to Facebook Groups, WhatsApp groups, LinkedIn or any other social media group. Result, all of that knowledge is now enclosed in a non-public place. All of this knowledge is not searchable. You need to be part of that group to find the knowledge. But, it’s hard to know what you don’t know. So if you don’t know about the groups, you may be left alone in the beach by yourself, singing a song and feeling a bit frustrated.
With the advance of LLMs (AI), things are not getting better. We are now asking the AI, getting good and bad answers, but we are not sharing this interaction with anyone. The result… this knowledge is enclosed behind a a username and password. The LLM that you are using can get better, as they can train themselves based on your interactions, but that’s it. No other LLM will be trained by that chat you had.
It’s not all bad, don’t get me wrong. The open public spaces are still here, indexable and with human interactions. A good example is Reddit, you can find any topic there, and it’s public. Result, we are building knowledge together.
On thesoftware-development area, we have Stack overflow. If you worked as a software engineer, you used it at some point. Please, keep posting things there (I’m probably talking to myself here), build knowledge for us all, not only for the big tech to train their models and give us answers without a reference.
That’s my call… share what you know in a public space. It doesn’t matter if it’s your website, a forum, Medium, X, YouTube, whatever… just choose something that’s indexable and public.