Having experienced the SO culture, I like to think the culture caused it - schadenfreude - but it was probably inevitable given AI.

Even if SO was the most wonderful friendly place in the galaxy, would you rather post a question and wait hours for a response, or get one instantly?

If the answers were better, you might.

They weren't. The most common answer was a hyperlink to an unrelated question followed by everyone being banned from answering your question

I could see SO being helpful for more niche questions where one guy somewhere knows the answer from experience or he wrote the framework.

But then over time, those will be absorbed into LLMs anyway, so…

Very new, beta stuff - AI can be helpful but too creative sometimes

And in some ways AI "search" works like SO - you ask a question, you get an answer. If you don't understand the answer or something in the answer you ask for clarification and it provides it. And you don't have to wait a day or a week for it. (Ofcourse, the AI gets it answers from human curated info pools like SEs, pirated books etc ... but if these sources shrink / die to AI, it may not be able to provide new and current information, and we'll be back to SEs and Reddits and HNs again).