The SEO/privacy trade-off isn’t new. Publishing publicly has always meant making content discoverable and so freely available in exchange for reach.
Google used embeddings 10 years ago to help map content. AI leverages the same technique but having been trained on large corpuses can also regurgitate content without users having to visit the source.
As a result, the unique value of forums shifts away from being repositories of facts and toward being places for conversation, trust, shared experience, and community.
I trust that people still want to “get it from the horse’s mouth” and are still social animals.
Talking to an AI is useful but a spiritual dead end.