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Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove knowledge from the community. So instead I

Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove knowledge from the community. So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message. Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days. How about repeatedly changing just a few characters, corrupting the post over a period of time? (Entrepreneurs: you can have "SO post gradual corruption as a service" for free, you're welcome)

surfingdino 2y ago
So you propose intentional answer rot?
- jjgreen 2y ago
  Let's call it "composting"
gruez 2y ago
1. What about all the humans reading your answers? I get you're on a crusade against AI, but it kinda sucks that you're potentially sabotaging student/junior programmers in the process. 2. This seems easily detectable, by checking edit volumes of a given user and/or post. Even 1 edit per month is probably going to be suspect compared to how infrequently posts actually get edited.
- jjgreen 2y ago
  No crusade, just offering constructive suggestions to the OP. Detectable, maybe -- month one, a few homonyms which could be spelling corrections: been -> bean etc, month two, (near-) synonyms: bean -> lentil ... throw in a few UFT8 homglyphs to add noise. Unlikely that that sort of corruption would be obvious to a machine, then manual checking is needed, and do they have the manpower for that?
  - tivert 2y ago
    It's also a programming website, so that kind of thing would probably be even better targeted at code examples and keywords (e.g. change a function name to something subtly inappropriate). That would have the added value of helping to make the derivative AI suggest errors, making it even less useful. Also one could also use a "masking" edit. Make the defacing change then another more innocuous one. > throw in a few [UTF8] homglyphs to add noise That seems like it could be defeated by a pretty straightforward normalization task. Either just a straight mapping or a mapping that's applied contextually (e.g. replace an omicron with an o, but only when the adjacent characters are ASCII).
- tivert 2y ago
  > 1. What about all the humans reading your answers? I get you're on a crusade against AI, but it kinda sucks that you're potentially sabotaging student/junior programmers in the process. What about them? Nothing's perfect. One rather effective of was of undermining any kind of effective protest, is to pepper it with demands for perfection that can only be satisfied though inaction. And I think there's a subtle contradiction in your objection: by doing something like this you're also sabotaging the thing that is slated to replace many of those those "student/junior programmers." So are you really doing them harm?

surfingdino 2y ago

So you propose intentional answer rot?

jjgreen 2y ago
Let's call it "composting"

gruez 2y ago

1. What about all the humans reading your answers? I get you're on a crusade against AI, but it kinda sucks that you're potentially sabotaging student/junior programmers in the process. 2. This seems easily detectable, by checking edit volumes of a given user and/or post. Even 1 edit per month is probably going to be suspect compared to how infrequently posts actually get edited.

jjgreen 2y ago
No crusade, just offering constructive suggestions to the OP. Detectable, maybe -- month one, a few homonyms which could be spelling corrections: been -> bean etc, month two, (near-) synonyms: bean -> lentil ... throw in a few UFT8 homglyphs to add noise. Unlikely that that sort of corruption would be obvious to a machine, then manual checking is needed, and do they have the manpower for that?
- tivert 2y ago
  It's also a programming website, so that kind of thing would probably be even better targeted at code examples and keywords (e.g. change a function name to something subtly inappropriate). That would have the added value of helping to make the derivative AI suggest errors, making it even less useful. Also one could also use a "masking" edit. Make the defacing change then another more innocuous one. > throw in a few [UTF8] homglyphs to add noise That seems like it could be defeated by a pretty straightforward normalization task. Either just a straight mapping or a mapping that's applied contextually (e.g. replace an omicron with an o, but only when the adjacent characters are ASCII).
tivert 2y ago
> 1. What about all the humans reading your answers? I get you're on a crusade against AI, but it kinda sucks that you're potentially sabotaging student/junior programmers in the process. What about them? Nothing's perfect. One rather effective of was of undermining any kind of effective protest, is to pepper it with demands for perfection that can only be satisfied though inaction. And I think there's a subtle contradiction in your objection: by doing something like this you're also sabotaging the thing that is slated to replace many of those those "student/junior programmers." So are you really doing them harm?