Discussion
RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/117598895030896382
Not that they were particularly useful, almost never actually had a good answer when Googling around but what do we all think, blame AI? Either Apple wants to prevent scraping or spammers were AI spamming with it?
@paul IIRC, they were completely rendered in Javascript, so regular AI scraping got nothing anyway.
@gregatron5 I can’t imagine that being a particularly hard hurdle to get over.
@paul I think @jsnell got that right:
“They were full of people asking questions and not getting useful answers, with many responses given by users who were more motivated to gain karma in the forum’s user-ranking system than to help.”
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/11/10/apple-support-community-closing-november-20/
@paul Maybe it was written in PHP and they didn’t want to deal with the security implications. I got rid of PHP stuff on my own site over the years because I didn’t want to spend time installing updates.
@paul I reckon it’s just too big a source of misinformation now. AI is regurgitating it to Apple’s users when they ask questions, and posting bullshit questions and bullshit answers, and new models learn from that. It’s “the death of the internet thanks to AI” playing out.
@paul Given that they not only close it and make it read-only, but outright removing it entirely, makes me think they just don’t want people to publicly post about their issues on an official Apple site.
@paul So now we're going to rely on AI generated answers derived from questionable forum sites. In other words, we're on our own!
@paul hopefully no AI has scraped any of that garbage “knowledge”. at least in recent years nothing useful in there for me.
@paul my theory: AI was causing issues (both posting content and ddos like traffic) just like on every other website, but no one could come up with a good reason to fix it.