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Comment by garciasn | Hacker News Reader

Maybe when it started back in the late 90s it was a bastion of great information; however, I have never found a single answer that was worthwhile on there when landing from a search engine query.

If anything, this is likely flooding LLMs with incomplete/invalid/useless information and it's just time they deprecated it in favor of something more modern and useful.

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Disagree.

According to my own browser history last time I landed on this forum was to figure out why the Apple Maps app was taking so much storage despite being a rarely used app. The post https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256084682?sortBy=rank, which was the first thing from a search engine query, completely solved the mystery. It was the stupid significant locations feature that I don’t need.

Then the second item in my browser history was https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253015477?sortBy=rank which explains how to change the location where screenshots are stored. Isn’t it a superbly intuitive UX design that locations of screenshots produced by Command-Shift-4 should be changed by pressing Command-Shift-5?

Believe it or not, Command-Shift-5 is the better UX compared to before, which was a `defaults` CLI command.

It’s bad UX because Command-Shift-5 brings up a UI that looks transient, and a user wouldn’t expect it to affect future invocations of Command-Shift-3 or 4. I’ve known multiple users who used Command-Shift-5 to take a single screenshot to their clipboard, and then lost all their subsequent Command-Shift-4 screenshots because they expect the screenshots to be saved to the filesystem not the clipboard.

The old `defaults` CLI command means almost no user would change the location of their screenshots so it would be consistent and predictable even when users switch between machines. Now a user has to use Command-Shift-5 first to configure the location before using Command-Shift-4.

Engineers from Apple would and do respond to some of the more technical questions here and there. Lots of great knowledge buried in their haystack. However, I generally agree that this used to be a more trustworthy resource back when forums were the Internet

I'm not even sure it was useful back then. So many answers to threads were just non-answers like "you can't do that" or "there is no fix."

It was easy to find people with the exact same problem as me, but getting the problem solved was often hopeless.

In some ways, community forums for such a highly obfuscated operating system are somewhat useless, because the answer is always "hopefully Apple notices this and fixes it."

You’re forgetting the mid-2000s classic:

“why would you want to do that?”

Don't forget to reset the PRAM.

Omg you and your parent commenter are bringing back nightmares.

Reminds me of this classic: https://www.thermocow.com/articles/apple-fanboys-defend-the-...

That's still useful.. 'No-one has managed to fix this' is good to know, even if it's not the answer one might want to find.

> It was easy to find people with the exact same problem as me, but getting the problem solved was often hopeles

That was true for me, back when my 14-month-old iMac (I was relying on to make music) developed color streaks on both sides of the display. The forum told me I was one of hundreds of victims ... before that topic was erased. A 'fix' took a couple of years to be offered.

Even „there is no fix“ is a helpful answer because it means I can stop searching the apple forum and instead turn to figuring out another solution.

I never took that type of response at face value though. Even experts are often wrong.

Well, that was the other problem with Apple discussions, nobody there was an expert.

It isn't helpful unless coming from an authoritative source, which the forum is not

The times I've searched there and came up with lazy answers that farm the forums by copy-pasting the happy path in official documentation... If you're going there, you're looking for cases when "just works" "just doesn't", and the fix isn't covered in the official use cases.

That compounded with how solutions become obsolete as Apple changes things for the sake of it makes me understand a little why Apple would want to sunset them.

Exactly. I already know the happy path. Repeating it back to me is just wasting everybody's time.

This reminds me of the ubiquitous message that every customer service robot repeats when you call them on the phone: "Please go to our website for help. Otherwise you'll be waiting here another 15 minutes."

No, you jerks. Your website is throwing a Javascript error and it doesn't work. That's why I'm calling you. Do you honestly think I'd have used the telephone if your damn website worked?

I feel like "please try our website" was helpful advice fifteen or twenty years ago. Now the only reason I'm calling is because your website is broken and your AI agent is only capable of linking to help pages.

At least it let you know that the problem you’re trying to solve is real (and typically unfixable) and it isn’t just you.

I’ve also heard that the forum went downhill after a major redesign in 2011.

That it isn't just you holding it wrong can be oddly comforting.

I always heard iOS engineers pissed by Apple's lack of documentation, is there something actually more modern and useful ?

While I agree with this, I'm also experiencing more bugs in Apple software than I ever have before, and it's really frustrating to see Apple shutting down the direct line of public feedback right in the middle of that.

But if a canonical good source of info is to exist, where should it be so that AI doesn't devolve? Is it simply upvoting answers AI gives us, but again where should that info go? Maybe this repo of info was bad, but it feels like there needs to be some repo.

Well, there was the infamous "double press enter on a blank password gives you root" thing, that started out on the apple forums, and _was_ a solution :-)

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/79235 (comments at the time: "macOS High Sierra: Anyone can login as “root” with empty password" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800676)

(although this one was the developer forum, which seems separate?)

Developer forums are indeed entirely separate, and historically quite useful. I haven't participated in years but it used to be easy enough to get eyeballs from relevant Apple engineers there.

> it's just time they deprecated it in favor of something more modern and useful.

If there was going to be "something more modern and useful", Apple would have posted that.

It appears that Apple is simply killing the community with no replacement.

Apple's view is if it is not intuitively obvious to you based on the User Interface you are doing it wrong, what you want to do is wrong, or you are stupid and should go to a genius bar for help.

It was never good or useful.

Not for the past ten years at least.

It's been useless for its entire lifetime.

It's slightly better than the Windows support forum only because it doesn't hijack your browser navigation, and because most answers don't start with "Hello $name, I am Doug America, a fellow user like yourself! I am happy to assist your question."

Actually it's also slightly improved from the earlier days, where nearly every thread was 1) works for me, it must be your fault, 2) why do you even want to do that? 3) that's not a bug, that's working as designed, 4) you think you know better than Apple how your computer should work? 5) oh, so you just hate Apple software? You're a Micro$oft fanboy? 6) you didn't even run EtreCheck, and you're asking why you keep getting Kernel panics? Why are you even posting here? Etc.

Now, occasionally, when it shows up in my search results, there are answers rather than just berating OP. (Kinda like StackOverflow, at some point they must have realized that you can't just cede control of your forum to the most pedantic users on there)

Same. I've almost never found my question actually answered there.

i agree with worthless answers

or should i say...

[i have this problem too]

Like an LLM!

Probably cheaper to have any moderators they've had curate the forum instead work on the internal knowledge base an LLM front end is relying on for grounding and the rhlf loop. Think Wikipedia moderators tending to the corpus with a chatbot serving users (lots of load bearing and aspiration in this comment, I am aware).

Still need a way to accept user reports and feedback (imho) that are not necessarily bug reports, otherwise they're going to have an observability blind spot that the community forum was providing via user participation.

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