Like many I was a taker, almost never asking or answering questions, but simply finding answers that helped me.

Even so, at some point I made sure to answer a few questions, to get enough reputation to upvote and occasionally comment. I wanted at least to be able to reward / thank those who had posted answers that I found helpful. Even for 5 or 10 year-old answers, if an answer helped me I'd upvote it.

Now we're all "taking" via AI. We don't know who posted a helpful answer 10 years ago that the AI learned from in order to help us. That saddens me.

But in a way that's just the way of the world. We know to credit Pythagorus and Fourier and a few others whose names are attached to their methods. But for the most part we're all constantly standing on the shoulders of anonymous giants whose names are long lost.