The end of asking stupid questions in public

Twenty years ago, Yahoo Answers user kavya posted the now-iconic question “How is babby formed?” It’s the kind of naive, sincere, even ridiculous question that feels anachronistic on the modern internet. Yahoo Answers is long gone (too bad, it once helped me to identify a song from partially remembered lyrics) and Stack Overflow has fallen below 1,000 posts per month, an incomprehensible drop of over 99% from six years earlier. Sure, people still ask these types of question on Reddit, but now you can’t help but suspect that these threads are designed to provoke particular reactions from behind feigned innocence, given the wealth of options for quickly answering the questions posed.

It is true that “Let Me Google That For You” is almost as old as “How is babby formed?”, but at least ignorance on the internet used to be somewhat defensible, as searching the right terms and parsing the results required at least a modicum of effort.

But now you can ask an LLM almost anything, privately. It’s certainly the safer option for the question asker, who avoids the possibility of embarrassment (unless you have Grok’s Roast Mode on, if that’s still a thing). But it also means these questions will never create a cultural footprint. There will be no more “Babbys” or “The Dumbest Boy Alive”.

Yes, people will still say dumb stuff on social media and get dunked on, but social media dogpiles carry little of the sincerity that made these classic exchanges great. Social media is a never-ending performance. We have lost the weird forum rabbit holes and eccentric websites that were such a great source of humour and fascination for so many on the old internet. The glorious, grasping mess of human communication has been replaced with a perfectly fluent but lifeless LLM answer.

It’s sort of like how the ability to pull out your phone to settle a bar trivia debate sucked the fun out of them, but at a societal scale.