Forums are just easier imo to dig up valid info / history the search function makes it easy to go find old topics to maybe shed light on your current problem. Fakebook / Twatter / Tictard, you have to scroll through endless cat pictures et al to get to anything if it even parses it properly for you. then lets throw in advertising and all the other shit they bury you under. ill stick with the forum's thank you.
even with AI, if it's trained on garbage, which it is, ie Fakebook, tictard, and twatter, it is not much use either, as some still need to learn. It does not have the capability of telling truth .vs. fiction many times and will very easily hallucinate and provide an answer to please you, that is dead wrong. ive seen it invent part numbers and make up stuff that does not even exist out of the blue, just to have something to show you. You don't get that with a forum search. AI is also lazy, well, it's trained to be like people so... like an engineer...there you go.
Even if you ask it for something specific like, what size plug fits my whirlygitzer it'll do a search then come back and say oh, that's a 2.1mm plug. Then you find out your gadget has a 2.5 mm plug, and the klanker goes, oh my bad.. 2.1 is the common size so i just assumed it fit that too. WHY would you assume when i asked you about a specific item, you couldn't go and research that item, or my specific use profile so you knew for sure? No, that takes an extra 200 milliseconds of time, let's go with the easy/lazy answer, just like it's programmers.
This is the danger of blindly cutting and pasting and then running with an AI answer to something, it does not know any better and you should! With a forum search, someone saying it's a 2.1 as an example, should immediately get called out by the other owners saying, ehh it's actually a 2.5, meaning for the most part the info HAS been double / triple checked and verified.
Forums may be old fashioned, but really, can't be beat for good first experience hands on knowledge. Even the so called Chiltons manual type books, tell you how to fix a thing properly... sometimes you need to just get it working, most AI won't tell you too much how to rig something out of liability issues, forums now, yah, we're here for ya buddy!
moto, nothing wrong with going to forums and i actually think you will be seeing a sort of renaissance emerge where people start going back to forums, because they are burnt out on the current models of feeding the flesh units.
now..where did that acoustical modem and my bbs 0.01.0a floppy disk goto.
Aaron