Yeah and it sucked for archival purposes then and it still sucks now and forums took its place and that’s still where serious people go to talk about their field. Want a custom ROM for your phone? You’re going on a forum. Want to know how to repair a specific thing on a car? You’re going on a forum. Want to talk about your new patchwork passion? You’re going on a forum.
But somehow there’s some fields (crypto, some parts of gaming…) where people have forgotten that or simply have never spent time on forums to see the difference in quality of info having an ongoing discussion makes.
Just thinking about the fields and fields of car, electric, and plumbing forums all sitting out there with broken links and dead photobucket / imgur embedded pictures…
You aren’t “archiving” shit of this magnitude. Forums and hosts get the real letters and even the more permissive countries and hosts tend to have minimal issues taking action for these kinds of leaks. They are just as transient as chat rooms with a much bigger investment to run
Which leave “dark web” sites that very much do exist but don’t get linked in news articles
Because PHP forums have clunky UI. Unless you’re used to them and know they contain good, rarely astroturfed/shill info, a web search is most people’s go to, leading to:
how do you upgrade 2016 Toyota Highlander suspension
LLMs like ChatGPT are tailored for that kind of ‘monkey using magic box’ method that is prevalent, but it’s still the same issues of bad info or SEO content bloating results without user feedback
