Interesting to see this topic caught the eye of so many long time people on Meta. I suspect many had the same curiosity: I wanted to see if it would turn into a Discussion about AI.
And the general consensus is pretty much as expected: LLMs are really disrupting how Discourse and support forums operate.
But interestingly, as I scrolled through this topic I thought about why I still visit Meta. After all, I don’t really need any support. Scrolling down and seeing very familiar faces I realized that at this stage I visit Meta because of who is here - I recognize all of you, have had good interactions with all of you in the past, and would bet a lot of money that you are actually real people.
And if that’s my main reason to come back, then maybe that’s one of the main pillars that community can really lean on going forward - being able to communicate with specific people about specific things.
Imagine for example, Carl Sagan had a Discourse instance where he specifically answered questions, published his own reports etc. Of course, first he would have to un-die, but putting that side it’s an interesting idea looking forward: forums becoming more and more about the people on them, and less and less about the specific problem they are trying to solve.
In the support space this could mean bringing in “celebrity” authorities to take part in topics. Taking Meta as an example, I love that Hawk and Sam still take part here, and Jeff obviously brought in a quite a crowd too.