Why I Prefer Asking AI Chatbots Instead of Posting on Forums

This series explores AI use cases: how AI can help you reach a solution or outcome. Remember that AI is probabilistic and can make mistakes, so anything it helps produce should be clearly labelled as AI-assisted and validated by a human It should also have a disclaimer similar to what most chatbots display beneath their output.

I had a story on my writing list about how I use AI. I wanted an example that was genuine and one a reader could relate to. I also wanted it to strike the right balance between being too simplistic and being overly complicated. Furthermore, I wanted the exchange to highlight some of what the more capable AI chatbots can now do.

My article in the series The AI Revolution - History Repeating Itself on the topic of Education has autobiographical elements. After I finished the first draft of that article, I went on a search spree to find the Sharp calculator I had mentioned in the post. The hunt was purely nostalgic.

As of this writing I have not managed to find it. That item existed three houses ago, and while I am sure I would never have thrown it out, I cannot rule out that it ended up in a box that was chucked out by mistake, or that when I left my parents’ house they had a spring clean and did not hold it in the same regard I would have. I haven’t given up: there are still a few nooks and crannies holding boxes and briefcases full of stuff I had long forgotten about. I promise to keep looking.

iRiver iFP-395T

My search unearthed a number of electronic devices. Maybe I will come round to making a “Product from the Past” video series in the future. One gadget that particularly struck a chord was the iRiver iFP-395T MP3 player, released in 2003 as part of the iFP-300 “Craft” series. Wikipedia has a page on the series at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRiver_iFP_series. The 395T, as you can see from the photos of my actual unit, came in a bronzy two-tone colour that was — and still is — timelessly beautiful. Its unusual curved shape, developed with design firm INNO Design, made it distinctive among the many boxy MP3 players of the period. It had a four-line monochrome LCD with a backlight and came with a then-massive 512MB of flash memory. It also came with a jacket which, as you can see, is a little worse for wear in my case.

It was surprisingly capable for such a small device. As well as playing MP3, WMA and ASF files, it had a built-in FM radio, a voice recorder and, unusually, direct MP3 encoding through its line-in socket, letting you record audio straight to the player. There were preset equaliser modes plus a custom five-band EQ, and it ran from a single AA battery. With the battery it weighs around 60g (2.1 oz).

AI, can you help?

I wanted to take this out for a spin. I put in a battery and it came to life. I had an audiobook I had transferred to my phone and decided to listen to it on the iRiver. There were two hindrances I had to deal with:

The audiobook was in M4B format. The phone had no issue playing it, but my MP3 player could not handle that format.Playback speed. Years of listening to podcasts and audiobooks have ruined the pleasure of listening to a source at the speed it was originally recorded at. While I suspect that producers ask narrators to artificially slow down (maybe because they get paid by the minute?), the bottom line is that I can only tolerate audio content if it is sped up by anything between 20 and 30%. On the phone this is just a slider; the iRiver lacked the capability.

I knew that FFmpeg would do the conversion, and I have it installed on my Windows computer. Appendix A contains the entire exchange for anyone wishing to read the conversation. I’ll summarise my observations:

In a short period of time I got an answer.When FFmpeg threw an error, I simply pasted the output back into the conversation. It took a couple of iterations, but the chatbot interpreted the output, explained what was going wrong and eventually provided the solution.Besides asking for the syntax to convert from one format to another, I also asked the chatbot how to speed up the file in Audacity. It made me aware that I could speed up the audio directly in FFmpeg without resorting to Audacity at all, and gave me the instructions on how to go about it.

How satisfied was I out of 10? 10.

Before AI

Before AI, or rather before AI matured to the point where it did not hallucinate quite so miserably and had a context window big enough to manage an exchange like the one I am sharing here, the options were either to Google it and work from there, or to head over to the forums.

Search

I see the state of AI today as a huge evolution of Search: a Search++, or Search v10. With Search you were given a list of sites that could answer your question. Even though Search was good at interpreting the question, the way the question was articulated determined the sites that were presented. (I will not delve into Google Search’s eventual enshittification to push paid content.) One would click a link and read through the material. For me, coming from a technical background, this method would work for the FFmpeg question. Had the topic fallen outside my knowledge and comfort zone, the story would have been completely different. When FFmpeg threw an error, I would have had to fish out the error line, paste it, and figure out the cause and how to fix it. Because each search was unaware of the earlier ones, I had to integrate the answers manually.

A traditional search would not have volunteered the fact that FFmpeg could also speed up the audio and that I did not need a second product. Had I asked Google Search specifically a question along the lines of “How do I speed up my audio in FFmpeg?”, it would have guided me to a site with the answer, but I would have had to direct the discussion, as it would not have understood my intent.

Forums

Forums could be a great place to find an answer to your questions. The idea is that you go somewhere experts and enthusiasts congregate to discuss a subject and exchange opinions, sometimes deep and profound, about it. They would have insight into what was coming and a genuine understanding of how the product had evolved. Newbies and people who did not know how to perform an action with a tool would ask and get an answer.

Before I proceed, I want to make clear that I will be focusing on my negative experiences with forums over many years. That does not mean there aren’t great channels where people are helpful and respectful. I am a faithful and forever client of MikroTik because of the dedicated help I have received over the years with this brand’s equipment in their forum. People there have worked with me and gone out of their way to help me set up my MikroTik equipment and integrate it with other hardware. There are others.

Why AI is proving to be better than forums

I am far from alone in walking away. Stack Overflow’s decline began before ChatGPT, but it has accelerated dramatically since generative AI became widely available. The number of new questions has fallen off a cliff. The community itself now openly debates whether the site is becoming a ghost town and why the decline has continued. Whatever the precise figures, the direction is unmistakable. The reasons people give for leaving line up closely with some of my own experiences, which I set out below.

The look-down, put-down attitude

While it is not exclusive to Stack Overflow, in my case I most associate the look-down/put-down attitude with this organisation. The clippings above are all my postings. Out of the 88 questions and answers I have posted across the Stack Exchange network, ten were ever downvoted, and every single one of them was a question I asked, never an answer I gave. 11% might not be big to some, but the number is not really the point: downvoting someone, or looking down on them, for asking a question respectfully is something that should never have been tolerated in the first place.

Being told that your post is a duplicate of something asked 10 years earlier is not something many would intuitively accept, all the more so in the ever-changing world of technology. Worse still, the “duplicate” is often for a different operating system, a different version, or a subtly different problem, yet the thread gets locked before anyone can attempt to help you. In the Meta post asking where did users go and what can be done to prevent that?, I reference the comment made by George Stocker. I strongly recommend reading this post in full.

We spent years giving folks negative feedback on their questions, they took it personally, and others saw that and stopped asking questions here because they didn’t want the negative feedback. Precisely how did you think this would go?

Incidentally, while researching this topic I came across a negatively rated post about FFmpeg, dated 28 July 2026. Old habits die hard.

None of this is just my thin skin. Stack Overflow itself admitted, as far back as 2018, that the site was not very welcoming and even built tools to classify the condescension, snark and sarcasm littering its comments. Others have documented the human cost at length: April Wensel’s Suffering on Stack Overflow and Peter Kellner’s Fixing Stack Overflow’s Bully Problem both describe a culture that rewards experts who show zero tolerance for newcomers — and note how the reputation system can leave a beginner, after a handful of poorly received questions, effectively blocked from asking anything more.

In fairness, the friction runs both ways. Much of it stems from a mismatch of expectations: newcomers arrive treating the site as a help desk for their immediate problem, while veterans guard it as a curated encyclopedia where duplicates and low-effort questions erode the value of the archive. Jon Skeet, one of the most prolific contributors the site has ever had, made this very point in his essay on Stack Overflow culture: answerers can be needlessly hostile, but askers, too, demand free labour, ignore the guidelines and bristle when asked for more detail.

If this philosophy was also shared by those running the site, it should have been made much clearer to people arriving there looking for help. The subsequent fall in activity suggests that there was a fundamental mismatch between what many users wanted from Stack Overflow and what the site itself was trying to be.

Long before moving to AI, I abandoned the Stack Overflow sites in favour of places such as Reddit and other forums.

The points that follow are not directed specifically at Stack Overflow. They are drawn from my experiences across forums and support communities over many years. Some will apply to one community more than another.

Comments for reputation’s sake

On forums with reputation or points systems, there are posters whose replies appear to exist only to push up their score. They add no value to the discussion and, even when they are not demeaning the poster, they distract others who could be helpful. For example, a question asking how to convert from M4B to MP3 in FFmpeg would attract a rant about how FFmpeg supports companies that make billions and do not contribute a cent, or a link to some other software that does the task, or a link to the product’s website with a note: read this. I file this under “If you have nothing positive or useful to say, then don’t”. These useless posts, besides being wholly unproductive, add noise to the thread and risk hijacking it (see below).

Turnaround times

I am Europe-based, around six hours ahead of the US East Coast. A reply from a forum frequented by Americans meant that an exchange could take as much as a day, unless I was willing and able to stay up well into the night — and even then there was no guarantee that someone would read it. Such delays made reaching a solution a lengthy process, spanning days if the exchange went back and forth.

Forum memory / consistency

I spoke about how improvements in AI memory have improved the exchange with a chatbot. With traditional forums, an exchange suffers memory loss the longer it becomes and the more responses it accumulates. Those offering assistance had to catch up on how the exchange had evolved over time, ignore the useless and distracting comments, understand the need, and provide an answer. When multiple people reply to a question without building on one another’s posts, each heads off in their own direction, resulting in a confused mess that may end up unrelated to what the original post set out to solve.

Time per question

Some posters had such a long list of material to work through that, like a doctor, they would spend only a limited amount of time understanding the question. Some technical support forums followed a script along these lines:

Glad I can help you, and rest assured I will do my best to help you find a solution.A standard list of things to try.

The problem is that this standard list was not derived from reading the post, nor tailored to the poster’s case; it was pasted into every thread. If the title mentioned “Problem with Windows Update”, out came the standard list of things to try, irrespective of what the original poster (OP) had actually written in the body. If the person came back to say that all of these had failed, my impression was that the thread was then at the mercy of whether someone in the community with a genuinely deep understanding of the topic would follow up on it.

Thread hijack

I have experienced threads that were hijacked. Normally this was the work of people who felt the need to comment on every post without adding value, or it frequently happened once a post had accumulated a large number of replies. When a thread was hijacked over a hotly debated topic, it was almost impossible to regain control of it.

Too much of an expert

Certain forums were run by subject-matter experts who lived and breathed the subject. Newbies, or people who did not live and breathe the topic and did not want to learn it — they just wanted an error to go away — could, even when they were not put down in the style of Stack Overflow, find themselves being helped by people ten levels above them, speaking terminology way over their heads. I have seen posts in which a person states that they do not understand what they are being told to do and need their hand held: “Could you please paste what I need to type into the computer?”

Unanswered / abandoned threads

Some threads, for whatever reason, never get served: one question and zero answers, or one question and many exchanges but still no answer.

Conclusion: The future of forums

Much of what AI chatbots can do is thanks to the enormous body of material people have published over the years: forum posts, books, user manuals, information from product owners, documentation, how-to videos and blogs. Recent improvements in LLMs have made these tools enormously useful and effective at hand-holding people through the process of solving a problem or reaching a goal.

If I have a question, my first port of call is a good AI chatbot, normally one set to its Thinking / Reasoning or Code and Problem Solving mode. These models have eliminated all of the negative experiences and inefficiencies I described above. An AI will re-explain the same thing five different ways without a sigh. There are no stupid questions, no eye-rolling, no shaming and no permanent public record of my “dumb” question following me around under my real name. I can ask it to explain something as though I know nothing about the subject, or to answer in a language that is not my first language, and it will tidy up a badly worded question rather than downvote it for poor grammar. It meets me where I am.

It is ironic that AI has benefited from the enormous amount of human knowledge accumulated on forums; in a sense, the forums helped build their own replacement. But that raises an uncomfortable question: if everyone asks an AI and nobody documents new problems and their solutions, where will the next generation of fresh information come from for future models to learn from? There is, perhaps, an answer.

Will forums become something that only older generations and (hopefully) the Internet Archive will remember? I think some will.

Others need to reinvent themselves, and here is a vision of how future forums could evolve. Embedded AI chatbots will be the front line for user queries. As happens today, many questions will come from individuals who are not really interested in the product, who have a problem they want solved and will never show their face in the forum, or the question will be a basic one that has already been asked countless times. In either case, there is little value in requiring a human community member to answer essentially the same question again and again.

The people who frequent these forums could look at the AI answers, discuss them, offer alternative views and build on them to enhance the thread, deepen their knowledge and engage with a community of others interested in the topic. This would also create fresh material that future AI systems could learn from. When a new version of the product comes out, the core insiders could take it apart and discuss the topics not yet part of the LLM’s core knowledge.

After an AI answer, the forum would offer the person the option to interact with the human community, an opportunity to dive deeper into what the solution does, how it has evolved and where it is heading. Many — perhaps the majority — will click straight past that button, and that is OK. The few who want to explore the community can be taken under its wing and helped to develop a deeper understanding of the product.

I come from the BBS (bulletin board system) and Usenet days, and even though those communities were certainly not as romantic and cuddly as nostalgia might suggest, there were some good people, and you could find genuinely interesting and insightful discussions; with perseverance you could come away with a deeper understanding of the subject matter. Disagreement and argument are the lifeblood of any forum, but nastiness, condescension and similar behaviour should not be tolerated, and those inclined towards it should be barred from helping others. AI can help weed out such people.

Appendix A - Asking an AI chatbot for help

The entire exchange

Note: The text below represents an actual exchange with one of my AI chatbots.

In several prompts, I pasted the full FFmpeg output after an error occurred. As these outputs were very lengthy, I have abbreviated them using vertical ellipses (⋮), retaining only the opening and closing portions where appropriate.The exchange was originally saved as a PDF and later converted to Markdown using another AI tool. I subsequently made manual edits, including the removal of unnecessary line breaks and minor formatting adjustments.