TLDR: I’m noticing that it is getting harder and harder to get answers by searching 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. That’s when my “passion” to understand and fix cars started. It started because I didn’t have much money, and a 30-year-old car will likely fail at some point. 😬
For any brand or car imaginable, we would have public forums with people asking questions and helping each other. It was lovely. “In the old days… 😆” I recently bought a Mahindra Pik Up. It’s not the most popular truck in NZ, and it was not straightforward 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. As a 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. If you don’t know about the groups, you may be left alone on the beach by yourself, singing a song and feeling frustrated.
With the advance of LLMs (AI), things are not improving. We are now asking the AI, getting good and bad answers, but we are not sharing this interaction with anyone. The result is that this knowledge is enclosed behind a username and password. The LLM you are using can improve, as they can train themselves based on your interactions, but that’s it. No other LLM will be taught by that chat you had.
It’s not all bad, don’t get me wrong. 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. As a 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. Whether it’s your website, a forum, Medium, X, YouTube, or whatever, choose something that’s indexable and public.