You Found the Answer with AI. But the Next Person Will Have to Start Over.

"These days, eight or ten questions out of ten, I just ask AI. I don't search forums anymore." A lot of people would say that now. But there's a second half that doesn't get said: before, when you solved a problem, the fix lived on the forum. Anyone who searched it could skip straight to the answer. Now, when you solve something with AI, the fix lives in your chat window. Close the tab, and it's gone. The number of active knowledge forums left worldwide: six. In the same period, Meta's employees alone used 60 trillion AI tokens in thirty days. Two numbers, one shift. Forums worked because questions and answers were public. The Stack Overflow page you found today might have been written eight years ago by someone stuck on the same thing. They wrote out the fix, you found it, it helped you. They probably never knew. That's how a shared knowledge base accumulates: everyone leaves their answer somewhere others can search. AI works differently. You ask, it answers. That exchange lives in your account, unindexed, not searchable by anyone else. The next person with the same question starts from scratch. Sixty trillion tokens shows how broadly people have made the switch. And as they move over, only six forums are still active, the public knowledge pool is getting smaller, and no one feels it because their own problem is already solved. The answer you found today exists because someone before you worked out the same thing and left the solution somewhere public. Where does what you just found with AI go?