Even ignoring learning outcomes, answer sharing was a good excuse for the nerds to talk to the not-nerds.

I think this is hard to understate.

I began my undergraduate in 2020, so it was mostly online and my uni group had a discord server we all used.

I already knew how to program pretty well, so there were plenty of nights where I sat in discord and helped people debug their programs. I wouldn't share answers directly as the professors checked for identical and identical-with-renamed-identifiers. So the incentives were pretty well aligned for a collaboration where the students did learn something themselves.

I was incentivized to teach them stuff instead of just fixing their problems, and they were incentivized to learn too (so as not to be stuck dependent on me and my time), and for the most part they did.

It was also a very easy way for me as a not-very-social-teen to get integrated and accepted into the group. Not in a transactional way: "I helped you so you owe me". But rather in the sense that they had to give me a chance and they spent time with me in an environment where I was comfortable, which made it more natural for them to invite me to social situations where it would have been more difficult for me to go directly without knowing the people in advance.

And just like people came to me for programming advice, we went to another guy who really knew Math and Physics for those subjects, and so on.

That is all gone now. What a shame.

There seems to be increasingly less of that these days

>Even ignoring learning outcomes, answer sharing was a good excuse for the nerds to talk to the not-nerds.

You mean to plagiarize their work. Now finally the nerds also have the option to have somebody else do their work for them.