I do think if we were having this conversation about an explicitly community-owned forum or fanfic hosting service -- ie, a scenario where it's obvious that the

I do think if we were having this conversation about an explicitly community-owned forum or fanfic hosting service -- ie, a scenario where it's obvious that the community is behind the decision -- my reaction would likely be very different. I'm broadly pretty sympathetic to a forum saying, "we're doing this for us, not for a VC firm." SO in specific though is an interesting site in that the value proposition of the site was very heavily based on this information being freely available and uncontrolled. I think they're in a position where it's much less appropriate for the site owners to try an clamp down on AI scraping. If there is a strong movement from the SO community to change that, I'm not aware of it, but who knows, maybe I'm out of the loop. Off the top of my head, another example of the distinction I'm getting at would be something like Wikipedia -- if the Wikipedia owners started trying to outright block site backups my immediate response would be, "well wait a second, that was not the deal we all made around this site, we signed up to help the Wikimedia foundation build an Open encyclopedia, even if that means it gets pulled into an AI dataset. We specifically didn't want the Wikimedia foundation to have the power to decide what usage of this data they would allow or deny."