The Decline of Online Knowledge Communities: Obstacles, Workarounds, and Sustainability
For researchers and designers of online knowledge communities, this work highlights the nuanced impact of generative AI and the need to reimagine socio-technical complementarities to ensure community sustainability.
This study investigates how generative AI impacts online knowledge communities (OKCs) like Stack Exchange and Reddit, finding that while users increasingly rely on AI for convenience, they still depend on OKCs for complex or trust-sensitive questions, and that sustaining sociability and reciprocity is key to community resilience.
Online knowledge communities (OKC) such as Stack Exchange, Reddit, and Zhihu have long functioned as socio technical infrastructures for collective problem solving. The rapid adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) introduces both complementarity and substitution. Large language models (LLMs) offer faster, more accessible drafts, yet divert traffic and contributions away from OKC that also provided their training data. To understand how communities adapt under this systemic shock, we report a mixed-methods study combining an online survey (N=217) and interviews with 11 current users. Findings show that while users increasingly rely on AI for convenience, they still turn to OKC for complex, ambiguous, or trust sensitive questions. Participants express polarized attitudes toward AI, reflecting divergent hopes and uncertainties about its role. Yet across perspectives, sustaining sociability, empathy, and reciprocity emerges as essential for community resilience. We argue that GenAI's impact constitutes not a terminal decline but a design challenge: to reimagine socio-technical complementarities that balance automation's efficiency with human judgment, trust, and collective stewardship in the evolving knowledge commons. To decline or sustain, it is now or never to take action.