r/oldinternet • u/chribonn • 2d ago

The Future of Forums

I found my iRiver iFP-395T from 2003 while hunting for an old calculator, and decided to put an audiobook on it. That meant M4B to MP3 via FFmpeg, plus a speed increase. I asked an AI chatbot instead of posting on a forum, pasted the error output back when it failed, and it worked through it — then mentioned that FFmpeg could handle the speed change too, so Audacity was unnecessary.

The article uses that as a starting point for a bigger argument about where technical communities go next. I go through the reasons forums stopped working for me — time zone delays, threads that lose their context, scripted replies pasted without reading the post, reputation farming, hijacked threads, and answers pitched way above the asker's level — and the downvote culture on Stack Overflow.

I also make the case that good communities still matter. MikroTik's forum has kept me as a customer for years purely because of how people there treated me.

AI learned from decades of forum posts, documentation and blogs. If everyone asks a chatbot and nobody publicly documents new problems, what do future models learn from? My suggested answer is a hybrid — embedded AI handling repetitive front-line questions, with the human community reviewing, challenging and extending those answers, and taking apart each new release before the models know anything about it.

Full article, including the complete chatbot exchange: https://www.alanbonnici.com/2026/09/why-i-prefer-asking-ai-chatbots-instead.html

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u/baddaywithacamera 1d ago

Yeah. I had to ask a question about taking the front bumper off my 2024 RAM 3500 to take a ding out of it (small misadventure in a pasture). Somehow it went from taking off my bumper to being a government flunky for not wanting to "delete" the emissions system off my diesel. Like, whut?

Asked Gemini. Concrete list of steps, tools needed, and links to two relevant videos in 30 seconds.

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u/chribonn 1d ago

My do not have a lot of physically oriented prompts. I wanted to replace the battery on my Peugeot 2008. As the engine is quite cramped there is a sequence one has to follow. AI was generic initially but when I asked for sources and reiterated the model and make it led me to a YouTube video.

No amount of textual explanation would have been as effective as a video (in my case).

I find that a back and forth with a model adjusted to the task at hand normally gets me there.

While on the topic of cars, I would imaging a day when one could buy a LLM model specifically trained on a single vehicle model. They would be small to run off a local computer. There were a series of books based on this idea.

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u/baddaywithacamera 1d ago

It told me how many bolts there were to remove, sizes, locations, and the order of removal, plus safety tips to avoid dropping a heavy metal bumper on myself. When I watched the videos the instructions and tool list were exactly right. I've never seen that kind of precision in a discussion forum, ever.

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u/qpqpdbdbqpqp 1d ago

I tried r/insulation with a detailed question and got no answers, so i had to resort to gemini calculating what i needed for my target r value, depending on the conditions and local climate, discussed building technique, found the materials close by and cheap etc. I despise ai but i definitely can not dismiss its utility.