StackExchange Inc's deal with OpenAI is extremely frustrating, and users are being left without much recourse.
the story is already hitting the tech press, but much of it is missing important details and context about how StackExchange sites are run, not to mention the history of organised protest against SEI's pro-LLM stance.
I wrote a bunch about it here, in case anyone is interested in learning more about the situation and its impact:
I would ask that folks please read the entire thread (the last post in the thread is here https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/112401426707865447 just in case it gets cut off) before considering replying here with comments or questions about the situation :)
@soatok probably, but doing lots of minor edits with no positive change will also get them all reverted. they've had automatic detection for that kind of thing for years as part of their spam / defacement prevention tooling.
@soatok ah, that'd maybe work, although I don't know what the threshold would be for useful poisoning. there are currently 82.3M questions and answers on the StackExchange network, plus countless more comments, so the per-unit efficacy of any poisoning would have to be extremely high.
@soatok@gsuberland I suspect individual activism is likely to be completely ineffective here and I'm not sure the minor effect would justify the downsides, but if you'd like to encourage it I suspect the more impactful path wouldn't be to organize changing answers you've given, it would be to systematically upvote and accept bad answers.
@soatok@gsuberland there's as much garbage as useful information on SO, and upvotes and accepted answers are the only practical signal to a scraper of whether an answer is useful or garbage.
But I think supporting the mods is the better answer, since if they have solidarity and boycott their work the site will go downhill rapidly anyway.
@foxyoreos@soatok solidarity in protest worked extremely well to effect change last time this came up. this time there's actual money on the line, though, so we'll see if it ends up being successful again. I imagine if not we'll see a major exodus.
@foxyoreos@soatok@gsuberland I've always been puzzled why anyone would volunteer their finite free time as a mod for a fully for profit corporate web corporation.
I've done modding but only for free and autonomous projects. It's a thankless task. I'd never do it again.
The really sad thing is the move from specialist run forums to single point of failure stack* type properties. #ExpertsExchange has been mentioned. #Github should be added to list of bad faith organizations.
@smxi@foxyoreos@soatok nobody's doing it for the company. they do it to maintain a community, and to help people find the answers they need. I wrote thousands of answers on that site over the space of a decade which were seen by over 9M people in the process. none of that was for SEI, it was for people who wanted to learn.
@smxi@foxyoreos@soatok the contract was always that SEI made cash from ad revenue and in return they kept the site running and dealt with administrative stuff. that's all it ever needed to be. SEI violated that contract by trying to extract more revenue in odious ways, and that's why we're in this situation.
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