AI can cheaply fake almost every signal we traditionally used to judge quality. I now see this pattern everywhere, in open source, in education, in research, all breaking at the same time. I find signaling theory useful for diagnosing what is happening and why it is so disorienting, and signaling theory and adjacent literature can provide the vocabulary to discuss possible solutions.
Yeah not to say StackExchange was a perfect answer either. It was the best we had. I frequently grated against their community guidelines for posting things, especially when somebody would mark a question as duplicate but then linked to something completely fucking unrelated. Developers can be curmudgeonly shits sometimes.
But it was far more trustworthy than what we have now. Cuz you can bet even if they were being smug shits, the people writing answers on SE were trying to be more correct than everybody else and prove it.