Post History

<blockquote>Just thinking of the effort of distilling a minimal working example, formatting the post correctly, and anticipating the downvotes, is enough to have an aversion to the site.</blockquote>

Frankly, this suggests your attitude is the problem.  Many questions don't require an example at all.  Reasonably formatting text you write is something you should have been used to since grade school, and is really no extra work.  If you're old enough to post here, writing text that others can easily read should come naturally.

The real effort of asking any question, whether in a Q&A forum, elsewhere on line, or in person, is to <i>think</i> about the problem.  What is it you are really stuck on?  What are you asking others to do for you?  What have you already done to try to solve the problem, and what does the failure of those things tell you about the problem?  What context do others need to understand your problem?  What information do you need to include to describe the problem succinctly, but completely enough so that others can help?

Yes, it takes some effort to properly ask a question, even if that's mostly organizing your thoughts.  Note that this process is useful, even required, so solve the problem whether you are asking other people, bots, or a rubber ducky.  In fact, that's the whole point of asking a rubber ducky, and why that method actually works sometimes.

If you're not willing to put in the effort, then you're not going to be successful on a Q&A site, but probably not elsewhere either.  On a Q&A site there are real people on the other end which will downvote questions that appear to come from a lazy entitled ingrate.  That's as it should be.  If you find your questions getting downvoted regularly, then the problem is with you, not the Q&A site.

<blockquote>So what’s the point of these Q&A communities if the friction to participate often outweighs the benefit</blockquote>

It doesn't, to most users in most cases anyway.  If you put in the effort as described above, there won't be any friction.

<blockquote>especially when a language model can give you an answer instantly?</blockquote>

Sure, it will give you <i>an</i> answer.  Is it the right one, though?  How do you know?  Vetting an answer can be more work than generating a proper answer from scratch.

A bot versus real people on the other end of a Q&A site are very different resources with different strengths and weaknesses.  If you are looking for a purely factual answer, something that a human would "look up", then a bot can be appropriate.

The Q&A site, on the other hand, gets you access to human experience, intuition, ability to make inferences and extrapolate from data, and the ability to not only give and answer, but explain <i>why</i> it's a good answer.