Your analysis is spot on, but I’m not sure your recommended path forward solves the issue. Search works great for people trying to find an answer. The search on the Stack Exchange site sucks hard, but either limiting your results to stackexchange in a general search engine, or using bitcoinsearch.xyz will get you good stuff.
However, search does not solve what regular site contributors see when they browse the page. If the frontpage is mostly garbage all the time, the experts just don’t come back after a while. Then nobody gets good answers anymore.
Well, you have to simultaneously make search more attractive and posting less attractive.
Make the search more powerful to lure people to only ask "good" questions on the forum and solve their "bad" questions with a chatbot. Make the chatbot read the forum itself. Maybe add tags/sorting/subforums in addition to that. Easier said than done, I know, but IMO this is what will make sites great in the future.
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Yeah, neat idea. If people attempting to ask a question were served a ChatGPT response compiled from the existing resources, and only post to the site if that doesn’t resolve their question that might be the best of both worlds: novice users would find their responses and get immediate feedback to improve their question as they iterate on the automatic response, and could even be helped to ask a good question if they don’t find what they are looking for.
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