Yet another Hacker News

Apple is killing its Support Community forum next week

139 points saikatsg 2 hours ago 78 comments

garciasn 2 hours ago | parent

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.

georgeecollins 1 hour ago | parent

Like an LLM!

toomuchtodo 1 hour ago | parent

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.

kccqzy 1 hour ago | parent

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?

george_perez 1 hour ago | parent

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

kccqzy 51 minutes ago | parent

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.

ravenstine 1 hour ago | parent

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

makeitdouble 1 hour ago | parent

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

layer8 1 hour ago | parent

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.

jolt42 55 minutes ago | parent

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.

lapcat 44 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

drbscl 2 hours ago | parent

A lot of the threads on there are “hey this thing is broken”, opened 7 years ago, and the problem still isn’t resolved

doctorpangloss 2 hours ago | parent

They someone fix one thing and break another in Home every release. And iMessages.... what a piece of shit.

f6v 1 hour ago | parent

What’s wrong with iMessage?

AlexandrB 1 hour ago | parent

Not sure what parent was referring to, but for me iMessage frequently gets confused when dealing with devices that don't have a phone number or when moving SIMs between phones. Sometimes messages silently get routed to other devices or seem to disappear into the void in these cases which can be extremely frustrating. Since it's Apple, there's no way to tell when this is happening and try to correct it either. In theory iMessages tells me I'm sending a message to John Smith, but am I sending it to johnsmith@icloud.com or 555-122-4455 or some other alias associated with that Apple user? No way to tell until you get some error in iMessage that the message could not be delivered and no way to explicitly select which alias is going to receive it as far as I can tell.

Edit: Admittedly, I have a poor mental model of what is even happening in these cases. Are these "aliases" or something else? Unfortunately, Apple doesn't help elucidate the problems/mechanisms here. The only insights I have into what's happening is from mysterious errors and failure to deliver messages.

lynndotpy 6 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

vandenthieren 2 hours ago | parent

Which reflects badly on Apple. Closing a forum with such embarrassing entries is cheaper than fixing anything. Apple has become a ludicrous shit show.

stronglikedan 1 hour ago | parent

Say what you will about Jobs, but his ability to avoid enshitification was legendary.

deaux 38 minutes ago | parent

That's indeed why it's taken down. Even recently I had an issue related to an external device that I thought was caused by the device. Turned out it was a Mac problem with a category of devices which didn't show this issue on any random Windows or even Linux box. I would never have known otherwise. It's clearly not in Apple's benefit for me to know this as it has lowered my opinion of their products.

There's not much other reason to completely take it offline.

skeeter2020 1 hour ago | parent

this is the exact same experience with the Microsoft "support forums"; I wonder if you see just as many posts from overseas social engineering scams asking for full details of everything as the first response to every single help request.

makeitdouble 1 hour ago | parent

TBF, this is useful in a way. At least you know what to expect.

sho 2 hours ago | parent

Good. It's useless - completely, utterly useless except as some sort of anthropological meta-study of the many and varied ways tech-challenged users will look for help in all the wrong places, the weirdos who apparently hang out there purporting to help them (and almost never doing so, except by accident) all downstream of a mega-corporation's Web 2.0 fever dream of not having to pay anything for customer support.

Now that I type all that out, I hope it's not completely deleted. Leave it to science.

BLKNSLVR 2 hours ago | parent

Sounds like it was a failed service from the start and they've only just now realized it's still there, now polluting AI answers - not hallucinated after all, borne from the worthless apple support forum.

toast0 2 hours ago | parent

> tech-challenged users will look for help in all the wrong places,

Shouldn't the vendor support community forums be the right place to get help for problems with a product?

I agree that they don't seem very effective. But where are they supposed to go?

sho 1 hour ago | parent

I imagine normal users are going to ChatGPT now - and that it's far, far better than anything they would ever find on apple.com

tatersolid 29 minutes ago | parent

No it’s not any better in my experience… the LLMs were trained on these forums. Are you suggesting that ChatGPT is trained on some internal Apple support knowledge base?

Asking frontier LLMs to troubleshoot weird user-facing issues in anything (Apple, Microsoft, Linux) is basically the same exercise in frustration that wading through search results and forums used to be. They all give confidently wrong answers and ignore critical context forcing pointless iterations and clarifications. Often there is no solution provided other than “reinstall” or similar.

phoghed 1 hour ago | parent

For Apple? Probably not, never had an issue getting tech support from a real person that speaks my language fluently.

For companies where you have almost no hope of getting a human on the line? Sure.

spiderfarmer 2 hours ago | parent

This is exactly how I deal with my tech debt.

Zenul_Abidin 2 hours ago | parent

You could never get an actual engineer to reply on those threads anyway. Whenever I had issues with my iPhone, I always find links to this forum and get disappointed.

underseacables 2 hours ago | parent

This. It was always some customer service person, and generally referenced other documents that were not helpful.

But I think this is indicative of Apple, and other large companies: they don't really want to deal with the customer. I do give Apple credit that their phone support is pretty good, but most companies would rather you give up then actually speak to someone and get help.

https://imgur.com/a/PhA5iT3

colesantiago 2 hours ago | parent

I could never get my issue resolved by an Apple Engineer via the support forums anyway.

So doesn’t affect me after they shut this down.

jordemort 2 hours ago | parent

oh no, where will I go to have some Apple enthusiast give a confidently wrong answer to my technical question now?

just kidding, the Genius Bar is still open

skeeter2020 1 hour ago | parent

isn't this pretty much every response from an LLM (probably trained on this shit)?

kjellsbells 2 hours ago | parent

good, can we kill the Microsoft one now? not every problem needs a new hardware driver and an sfc /scannow but that's what the community seems to have settled on for the last 15 years

skeeter2020 1 hour ago | parent

when they're not trying to do the support scam - inbound marketing style!

sunaookami 1 hour ago | parent

But Microsoft Answers did shut down last year?

EDIT: Seems like there is Microsoft Q&A now but it's a ghost town

rootsudo 2 hours ago | parent

Sign of the times, but like the google forums, it's all "contact google support" / "contact apple support" with little insight outside of apple administrative policies.

mort96 2 hours ago | parent

There's also a ton of "fixes" which don't work.

My most annoying long-term peeve with macOS is how long it takes to switch spaces with the touchpad gesture. It takes like 1.5 seconds from the gesture starts until a window on the target space gains focus. It was bad on 60Hz laptops but it's much worse on their ProMotion laptops.

There are lots and lots of support forum threads about this issue. Almost all of them have at least one person saying it can be fixed by turning on Reduce Motion in settings. It can't. Reduce Motion turns it from a 1.5 second slide animation to a 1.5 second cross-fade animation. I don't think the people suggesting fixes there even make an attempt at understanding the issue or trying out their proposed fix.

frizlab 58 minutes ago | parent

FWIW there’s an app for that https://space-rabbit.app/

mort96 40 minutes ago | parent

I don't want to switch spaces using my keyboard, I like the touchpad gesture. Since I need a workflow where I can't use my preferred gesture anyway I just don't use spaces and have learned to live with cmd+tab and cmd+`.

waiwai933 1 hour ago | parent

The Developer Forums appear to be staying around (or at least there is no banner across the top of them, and they have not been put in read-only mode)

lapcat 45 minutes ago | parent

For now…

I have to suspect that the developer forums are next.

Jordan-117 1 hour ago | parent

I feel bad for the people who dedicated significant time to helping others there. I just pulled up a random page and there are users with tens of thousands of answers and profiles professing their love of all things Apple. Suddenly going read-only with no warning and killing it shortly after just seems like such a cold and abrupt way to end what was clearly some people's hobby and point of pride. I hope they at least do something to privately acknowledge the most helpful users beyond the boilerplate message.

sunaookami 1 hour ago | parent

Let's face it, most of the answers were non-answers by people trying to up their reply count. I have never ever found anything helpful in these forums and anything slightly negative towards Apple gets handwaved away by these "powerusers". It had the same problem as the MS Answers forum. Good riddance.

microtonal 57 minutes ago | parent

I have the same experience with such forums. Worse, they often clutter search results with their non-answers (yes, I know you can filter them with Kagi). These companies probably loved the idea of free labor, but 'community experts' usually don't have access to relevant internal information or developers to address many real problems.

Eric_WVGG 37 minutes ago | parent

“trying to up their reply count” what’s the incentive for that?

But yeah I’ve never found a decent answer to anything there, mostly just “I dunno try this” or “do that thing you said you already tried.” Good night.

0x264 28 minutes ago | parent

> what’s the incentive for that?

Everybody collects _something_.

hard_times 28 minutes ago | parent

> what’s the incentive for that

Clout is one hell of a thing

skinfaxi 13 minutes ago | parent

People care about karma on this site. What's the incentive for that?

hcurtiss 21 minutes ago | parent

Agreed. 90% of it was the same copy and paste (run these eight reports, uninstall and reinstall your software, then come talk to us). Like, no, I just want to know whether anyone has found a solution this problem.

tart-lemonade 20 minutes ago | parent

I feel like community forums for big companies trend towards this steady state of mediocrity since the forums are usually treated as a dumping ground to try and offload support obligations, giving the appearance of caring without having to add anyone new to the payroll. The people who become absorbed in these forums are in the ultimate parasocial relationship and are ill-equipped to answer the questions because their knowledge of the product rarely goes beyond surface level, so their answers tend to fall into the "happy path" category, the ones usually available in public documentation.

In this regard, LLMs tend to be more useful in my experience (and I suspect this is playing a part in Apple's discontinuation of the forum, though the article is cut off by a paywall so I don't know if it mentions this). They have the same pitfalls of happy paths (and hallucinations, of course), but they are quite good about digging up some random tangent from a GitHub discussion for a completely unrelated product five years ago that ends up being exactly what you need with some extra prompting.

Marsymars 17 minutes ago | parent

> It had the same problem as the MS Answers forum.

I had the exact same thought when I saw the headline. For their purported use, both forums have bafflingly low signal-to-noise.

tambourine_man 24 minutes ago | parent

It’s a good reminder that it’s never your profile on someone’s platform. It’s their profile with your user handle. And their data.

throw0101c 23 minutes ago | parent

> I feel bad for the people who dedicated significant time to helping others there.

Why? When they wrote those answers they (presumably) helped the people who asked questions at the time.

The fact that what they wrote won't (necessarily) continue indefinitely into the future doesn't diminish the value they provided in the past.

timcobb 13 minutes ago | parent

It was presumably a fun part of their life and they won't be able to look at it anymore.

simonw 8 minutes ago | parent

Those profiles represent thousands of hours of invested time. Having them deleted from the internet means they've lost all of that accumulated work.

When I answer questions in a public forum, helping the person who asked the question is only about half of the value I expect to get from my contribution.

throwaway384034 11 minutes ago | parent

Tale as old as the internet. WoW player dumps 1000s of hours only to have their account rendered useless.

1over137 1 hour ago | parent

I miss Apple’s mailing lists. They were quite good back in the day.

rolosa 1 hour ago | parent

Good riddance. Every time I search for help and I find a link to one of these pages, it is the worst thing in the world. There is no useful information there whatsoever from what I can tell.

herf 1 hour ago | parent

It could be they ran Mythos on it, found a lot of bugs, and decided it wasn't worth patching.

TheRealPomax 1 hour ago | parent

Did anyone ever actually get answers on that thing in the last several decades? Every question I've found there was someone asking a real question by someone who wants ownership of their devices, with an answer that boils down to "live with it, or contact Apple themselves if you can't", which shuts down the conversation real good. Hopefully now at least it won't pollute search results anymore?

Aurornis 1 hour ago | parent

The value of a product community forum is proportional to the technical abilities of its users.

The Apple and Microsoft community support forums may have had more value years ago when the only people who knew how to find and use a forum were already technical. It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when making an account on a site to talk to other people was unusual for average people.

Today, the only useful community support forums I visit are for highly technical products. Anyone participating has a baseline level of competency to even get into the software or hardware, so conversation quality is higher.

The Apple (and Microsoft) community forums almost always have a 12–page thread of people having my same issue and no solution. There is also the strange phenomenon of the community members who want to be very helpful but are only copying and pasting “have you tried turning it off and back on again” or “wipe your device and reinstall” non-solutions.

I’m surprised the Apple community forums lasted this long. I can remember a couple solutions I found there, but most of my visits were frustrating experiences of clicking through pages of threads of people complaining about the same thing. Even when someone did post a solution, it could get lost in infinite posts from users who didn’t know how to use a forum but kept adding complaints to the thread.

pixl97 1 hour ago | parent

>strange phenomenon of the community members who want to be very helpful

Yea, those are annoying. "Turning on and off 50 computers is obviously not the solution".

With that said, individual computer problems can be very hard to solve. There are just so many different possible things going wrong. Now, if you get lots of people reporting it, and the reports point to a common cause then it's something that should be investigated.

jorams 2 minutes ago | parent

Small correction: proportional, not inversely proportional.

I mostly agree, but my tiny amount of interaction with the Apple forum, on rather technical matters, highlighted another factor: The specific macOS error messages I was researching were beyond useless and seemed to have thousands of unrelated possible causes and solutions. So I found thread after thread, some with many pages of posts, offering many different solutions that worked for some people and not for others.

humblepie 1 hour ago | parent

That's good. Right now that site is just polluting search results with useless info. It used to be helpful back pre-2010s.

throw0101c 1 hour ago | parent

So the statement says:

> The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state.

It is unclear to me whether the "read-only state" is only what it currently is, or whether it will continue to be available read-only (for a while) into the future.

Presumably the folks at the Internet Archive will be grabbing what they can.

throw0101c 1 hour ago | parent

Older thread with less/no traction:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50451348

mannyv 51 minutes ago | parent

If I need any help gemini is just fine. And for many real issues the forums were totally useless and essentially provided placebo-like actions that did nothing.

Example: "my iPhone's photo library won't sync." Here are 15 things to do that are pointless but might have worked once for someone 18 years ago.

lapcat 47 minutes ago | parent

"Apple has confirmed to us that not only are the forums getting shut down, they're being taken completely offline." https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/11/11/apple-support-com...

AuthorizedCust 46 minutes ago | parent

It’s just like the Microsoft forums: it’s stacked with trolls providing useless answers just to jack up some kind of score.

You rarely get good advice in these kinds of forums.

expedition32 41 minutes ago | parent

The problem with forums is that 20 year olds don't have the patience to use them- and that is even assuming they can read.

And yeah I know just ask AI9000 but guess where it gets the answers from...

twodave 30 minutes ago | parent

Not surprising. Most of the information I’ve found on the forum is either obvious (to me), flat out wrong or else just a “yep we don’t support that”.

willmadden 30 minutes ago | parent

That forum has been useless for a long, long time. It needed weighted answers from the community and moderators to ban spammers and prevent sybil attacks.

RockstarSprain 20 minutes ago | parent

Good riddance. Honestly, the only thing I remember about those forums was that they hijack the back keyboard shortcut so I had to reach for the button every time I misclicked on a thread there. Never found anything useful there about the problems I was researching.

NetOpWibby 15 minutes ago | parent

I'm surprised there's a severe lack of moral outrage here...huh.

These forums were never helpful for me, random blogs, Reddit, and other forums (lol) have always been helpful.

timcobb 12 minutes ago | parent

I don't understand, what am I supposed to search for now when I have a question? A lot of that stuff has been saved in scrapes and llms but pretty weird that they're just taking it offline?

Are they going to replace it with anything? Where will people discuss their Apple support issues?