Hard to imagine a signal that a website is a rugpull more intense than banning users for trying to delete their own posts

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/stack-overflow-bans-users-en-masse-for-rebelling-against-openai-partnership-users-banned-for-deleting-answers-to-prevent-them-being-used-to-train-chatgpt

Like just incredible "burning the future to power the present" energy here

Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT

Stack Overflow is overflowing with salt.

Tom's Hardware
@mcc So developers will stop sharing information on #StackOverflow and future #Copilot and friends will be forever stuck in the past, answering questions about historically relevant frameworks and languages.
#LLM #StuckOverflow
@chris Yeah. But for this to be true, we need a Stack Overflow replacement. And when Reddit went evil, the move to Lemmy doesn't seem to have succeeded as well as the move from Twitter to Mastodon.
@mcc IIRC Mastodon is older than Lemmy and the current move to Mastodon/Fedi happened in multiple waves, so it may be too early for higher expectations.
For stackoverflow I expect some degradation of quality since they accept “AI” generated content. This may additionally frustrate high quality authors and motivate them to leave. We’ll see.
What would a federated stack overflow look like if we were to invent it?

@chris I don't know. It's an interesting question because Stack Overflow is inherently more search-focused than Lemmy or Mastodon.

A good model for a distributed/ownerless SO might wind up looking more like bluesky than mastodon.

@chris And, of course, there's the weird element that the SO license *already* does not permit AI on a facial reading, and a distributed SO would probably be *easier* to scrape than the centralized one. So you're not actually preventing AI exploitation, you're only punishing one corporation (SO) for the AI bait-and-switch.
@mcc I personally see less problem in scraping a federated pool of knowledge but I absolutely hate that stackoverflow now owns this knowledge and can keep people from using it but sell “AI” as a service to them.
@chris @mcc SO publishes database dumps so we could all make a fork and start from there with something more libre
@hey Good idea!
I was wondering if they still did and I expected, that they already stopped doing this.
I had this tool that indexed local copies of SO for referencing but I keep forgetting to reinstall it and update the database.
Thanks for reminding me!

@chris they still do (https://archive.org/details/stackexchange) and still out of their own infrastructure.

IIRC they made Stack Exchange as a response of entshittication of another Q&A service and when they designed it they made a promise to make the content on open license and publicly available so once they go evil people can move on somewhere else taking the content with them.

Which I guess might be heading into this direction.

Stack Exchange Data Dump : Stack Exchange, Inc. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

This is an anonymized dump of all user-contributed content on the Stack Exchange network. Each site is formatted as a separate archive consisting of XML files...

Internet Archive