I don't know whether it's nostalgia for the past or whether it really was easier to find things. If you say so, then it could be. It's true that in certain fields it really was easy to find things, and it also differed from country to country. Where I was, there was mainly gatekeeping—a kind of control. In that sense, was the past really better? I don't know. In the past, there were quite a few cases where learning a particular skill required an absurd amount of money (though this may be because I'm from an East Asian country). I think what made people enthusiastic about Udemy was probably that, in my memory, it offered those expensive courses cheaply or gathered the information together.

I don't think forums are bad, but I've questioned whether experiences in such forums were always pleasant. There was a lot of wrong information, and there were also many people who picked fights for no reason simply because they didn't like something. But AI really does just tell you knowledge easily.

Of course, forum activity gave me the opportunity to come across knowledge whose keywords I didn't even know, and that got me studying, but I question whether such forum activity was open to everyone.

I also somewhat agree that the problem of the knowledge base shrinking is real. But is that problem really unsolvable? As far as I know, the results on the degradation problem of synthetic data say that if there is synthetic data, there isn't that much degradation. People, too, tend to idealize the past as they get older. Like treating the inconveniences of that time as nostalgia.

I don't know. Rather, once the current SLOP era passes, certain knowledgeable people may become rare and be treated well then. The future can't be known.

Anyway, this is purely a matter of values "Some people may regret the destruction of knowledge communities, but I benefited from that destruction, so I can say it's good. People always judge by their own experience, don't they? I respect your past experience. In the cases you went through, I think AI produced more bad effects than good.

I've also seen many things disappear because of AI, but it let me try things I wanted to try, and I think that part is good. So, honestly, I don't know. I have both affection and hatred for AI. But the affection seems a little bigger.