I'm certain the commercial aspect has something to do with it. At some point, the search engines had to be profitable.
And to be fair, the same thing seems to have happened with other fairly benign-seeming freewheeling forums on subjects as diverse as the care and styling of long hair, and the small-scale raising of poultry. It's really hard to find the good forums anymore. The search engines only want to give you the bland corporate mush websites where there is no discussion going on. Just experts telling you the prepackaged "correct" answer to some question other than the one you're asking. It's like being stuck in a telephone tree where none of the options are what you need, and there's no "speak to a representative" button.
On the other hand... you'd think there'd be *some* way for enabling person-to-person discussions that aren't limited to telegraphy numbers of characters to be profitable. The demand exists. On some level, somewhere, I don't think it's accidental that regular sharing-of-information between ordinary people is being squelched in favor of top-down message-from-on-high stuff, while at the same time the natural human tendency to gather and talk face to face is being slowly smothered in favor of electronic communication. It feels malicious and anti-human.
Re: Thank you
And to be fair, the same thing seems to have happened with other fairly benign-seeming freewheeling forums on subjects as diverse as the care and styling of long hair, and the small-scale raising of poultry. It's really hard to find the good forums anymore. The search engines only want to give you the bland corporate mush websites where there is no discussion going on. Just experts telling you the prepackaged "correct" answer to some question other than the one you're asking. It's like being stuck in a telephone tree where none of the options are what you need, and there's no "speak to a representative" button.
On the other hand... you'd think there'd be *some* way for enabling person-to-person discussions that aren't limited to telegraphy numbers of characters to be profitable. The demand exists. On some level, somewhere, I don't think it's accidental that regular sharing-of-information between ordinary people is being squelched in favor of top-down message-from-on-high stuff, while at the same time the natural human tendency to gather and talk face to face is being slowly smothered in favor of electronic communication. It feels malicious and anti-human.