Regarding the Apple Support Community

discussions.apple.com:

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.

Jason Snell:

These message boards were an embarrassment for Apple. Not only were they very much out of step with what the web has come to be over the last couple of decades, but their presence under an apple.com domain meant that they ranked highly in search and were perceived by the general public as being official in some way.

But they weren’t, nor were they helpful. They were full of people asking questions and not getting useful answers, with many responses given by users who were more motivated to gain karma in the forum’s user-ranking system than to help. I can’t tell you how many times I visited these forums while trying to track down the answer to a peculiar quirk or bug, only to find the (legitimate!) question being shut down by an officious high-ranking know-it-all who didn’t actually understand what was being asked and couldn’t provide a useful answer.

I’m not emotionally attached to the Apple Discussions space, nor am I nostalgic for what it once was. Apple’s decision is correct and long overdue but I have been thinking a lot about Dead Internet Theory and how important forums are to the open web, community and keeping the humans in charge of the Internet as we march forward into our bot-powered future. AI uses data we create to train and provide additional value so as blogs, forums, enthusiast sites and content creators lose their spaces of expression, the data we need will degrade and sour that many more millions of people utilize when they query something via an AI tool.

Does Apple owe ChatGPT a space to crawl and serve up information to people? Not at all and was the information posted to discussions adding a lot of technical value that AppleCare and Geniuses can’t perform themselves? Nope.

I still think Apple could have made one of two choices. The easy one was to kill the discussion space and they did. The other was to nuke it because the relevance is just not there and replace it with an Apple-staffed space, re-write the engine to borrow Kbase and technical documentation in addition to enabling customers to self-serve, communicate and share ideas that may not be Apple-Official but totally work. This decision would have also enabled Apple to maintain control over the community and keep the information accurate and relevant so others can also self-serve. Apple doesn’t control the communities on Reddit, YouTube, X or HackerNews.

You can say, “well the forums were already dead” but Apple had a hand in this. There isn’t any link to access those forums in KBASE docs or any sort of promotion by Apple and this community has languished completely without Apple staff for many years. There are still tons of Apple-fan-forums out there but Apple had an opportunity (remember AirPort / Time Capsule) to do something special and took the easy way out.

Apple Discussions as it is today deserved to be killed off but it should have been replaced with a better product.