Closing garbage is one of the best features of SO. When I began answering questions on Reddit I was literally answering the same shit every few days. It's insane. People asking the same shit without doing any research prior is creating a ton of pointless work for people who can answer. Reddit, as well as Lemmy have no better ways to resolve this problem. SO does it via strict moderation. I guess if ChatGPT can find you a good answer from the bajillion duplicates without having to waste a SME's time, that's a positive. But yeah, I thank SO's moderators for keeping it clean. I'd lose my mind as an asker and especially answerer if I had to keep doing this over and over again. I also have feelings and sifting through mountains of duplicates or having to answer the same questions over and over again hurts me.

Not to mention the fact that even if a similar question were answered, if that thread is from 2012, the answer will, with 99% certainty, be totally irrelevant now.

SO has always been a bastion of power hungry dickbags who get off on acting superior and putting others down. They way it's structured reinforces this. It turned what should have been a great place to help each other into a fucking bloodsport arena.

Also, fuck LLMs.

I'm with you. It's amazing how fast ChatGPT has replaced SO for me.

I'm not sure how this will work long term. How will the model get new training data?

But honestly? SO can eat a bag of dicks. It doesn't matter if you're asking a question that's nowhere on the site (or the first 3 pages of Google results). It's going to get closed and ignored.

I think most people moved to Reddit and Discord a while ago, which is also problematic. We need to get these conversations happening on the open Fediverse.