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Stack Overflow users deleting answers after OpenAI partnership

• uberman 2y ago
  In addition to deleting answers, I think protesters should up vote wrong answers and crappy posts. For years the community has defended punitive down votes on correct answers to crappy questions as "you can do with your vote as you like". I see no argument against flipping that around.
  • wseqyrku 2y ago
    What is the end game here? You wanna get paid? That wouldn't be more than a few cents, just like how Spotify deals with artists.
    • uberman 2y ago
      My personal end game if I have one and I'm not sure I do would be to ensure that I can help individual novice programmers become better at their craft. Not to make billion dollar corporations even richer.
      • williamcotton 2y ago
        What's your stance on when there are open source LLMs that are as capable or more capable than GPT-4?
        • Brian_K_White 2y ago
          Does everyone get equal access to let their own copy of the open source llm download a copy of SO? Are those open source llm users in turn selling access to the content they got for free, and also stripped of attribution? What exactly is changing hands in trade for the money, that doesn't one way or another violate CC-BY-SA? It's not merely the fact of any form of commercial activity, since there is no NC in there, but the specific actions here by both StackOverflow and OpenAI violate the terms the content was originally created and shared under.
          • williamcotton 2y ago
            CC-BY-SA is a copyright license. If LLMs are found to be fair use then there is no copyright infringement regardless of license.
      • jncfhnb 2y ago
        And you intend to do this by signaling that incorrect answers are correct?
    • nkrisc 2y ago
      No one needs a sensible, logical, or even rational reason to do that which they are already entitled to do.
      • Brian_K_White 2y ago
        You know they read this as "They can do something illogical if they want to." instead of "They don't owe you an explaination of their reasoning nor require your approval of it, and your not knowing or understanding or agreeing with their reasoning does not mean there is none or make it invalid."
        • nkrisc 2y ago
          It’s all the same. Whether it’s rational or not isn’t really relevant and is subjective.
          • wseqyrku 2y ago
            "logic is subjective." noted.
            • nkrisc 2y ago
              In social interactions, well, yes. If you have a formal logical framework of human behavior I'd love to see it.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• j45 2y ago
  As an early user of SO, I certainly don't want my answers sold for profit again and again.
  • jonathankoren 2y ago
    Your answers are already sold for profit again and again. That's the whole point of SO existing, or maybe you under some delusion that SO is a charity?
    • j45 2y ago
      No delusion. Specific licensing and side deals is different to me at least than scraping.
  • vkou 2y ago
    Then you shouldn't have been posting on SO. If you want to contribute to the commons, contribute to the commons. If you want to contribute to the commons without commercialization of your work, contribute with some non-com license [1]. If you want to feed a corporation with your labour, post on SO. [1] It'll still be illegally scraped and commercialized by some AIBro, and you'll have no proof or recourse against them...
    • j45 2y ago
      Scraping to me is different than side licensing the content in some other form or usage than what it was created for. Licensing also means the writer retains the ownership. Cc-by-sa has had a few revisions too.
  • kragen 2y ago
    the so license is cc-by-sa and has been since the beginning, not cc-by-nc-sa
    • j45 2y ago
      True. Cc-by-sa has had a few revisions. Attribution would be lost in an llm, no?
• blibble 2y ago
  there are several nice libraries that allow you to generate plausible sounding gibberish this one is particularly nice and easy to use: https://github.com/jsvine/markovify/ https://github.com/jsvine/markovify/ you give it a file of existing text and it generates complete rubbish that would pass most automatic filters
  • ceejayoz 2y ago
    These are far more likely to come to moderator attention by user flags on the edited posts.
    • blibble 2y ago
      for the AI to be useful it has to be continuously updated with new good data so add small bits of rubbish slowly over time, and don't even contribute again it'll take a while to completely destroy the AI business model, but we'll get there
      • dylan604 2y ago
        > but we'll get there at some point, it'll be too late. the horse has already left the barn. besides, if the site owner makes a deal with the devil, there's nothing you can do other than quit using the site. people are still using social platforms more than ever, so stopping isn't going to happen. the more likely to happen is that accounts deemed to be polluting the waters will just get suspended with no recourse to have it re-instated.
        • blibble 2y ago
          > at some point, it'll be too late. the horse has already left the barn. I don't think this is true: the technology is useless unless it parasitises new knowledge continuously it sows the seeds of its own destruction by reducing the value of past and future contributions to zero > the more likely to happen is that accounts deemed to be polluting the waters will just get suspended with no recourse to have it re-instated. so this is also perfectly acceptable: once they've banned the top 20% the site effectively becomes read-only, and the AI knowledge previously parasitised from it atrophies with no replacement
• Bobo-hilife 2y ago
  Resistance is futile!
• greenyoda 2y ago
  Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297027
• Ukv 2y ago
  From a search, the message seems to have been in place since at least 2017[0] and I'd suspect is automated on detection of mass-deletion. I can understand the reason for the policy (in some ways SO functions more like a wiki than a forum) and it doesn't seem to have been introduced to quell the protest against OpenAI. [0]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/296822/287788 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/296822/287788
• jaimehrubiks 2y ago
  It's sad :( I preferred the old days better
• user3939382 2y ago
  SO made it such a pain in the ass to contribute I gave up trying every time I’ve historically been interested. Like I’m already sacrificing my time to offer my expertise helping someone, you want me to jump through a bunch of hoops to have the privilege of doing so? No thanks.
  • colechristensen 2y ago
    That same amount of pain in the ass gaming made spam and terrible quality answers equally discouraged. Given the volume of at least decent content on stack overflow, I'd say the game worked. Somebody could try to make it better with a competitor but it would be a hard thing to succeed at.
    • lmm 2y ago
      The more hoops they've added the worse the quality has gotten. The quality has declined over time, and most of the good answers you see nowadays are from people who got in the habit of contributing back when the process was much simpler, and would likely never have joined the site if it was as onerous as it is today.
      • hedora 2y ago
        On a related note, it costs my employer way more to pay me to solve a captcha than it would to pay a captcha solving service. At some point, passing the hoops turns into a negative predictor of comment quality.
    • malfist 2y ago
      Have you assessed they quality of QA's that aren't years old? Anything decent that I find is usually quite old and possibly out of date. It doesn't help that asking for a more recent answer gets your question closed as a duplicate, and new answers can never overcome the inertia of the historical ones. September has came for stack overflow
  • majorchord 2y ago
    What do you suggest as a better alternative?
• jonathankoren 2y ago
  OpenAI shouldn't have paid a license. Just scrape the content. It's fair use. Now they paid the shakedown fee, and Stack Overflow has user riot on their hands, albeit one that's trivial to shutdown. Send OpenAI the db backup.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • kragen 2y ago
    fair use applies when there's a copyright infringement to defend against, but the cc license on stackoverflow clearly permits scraping the content
    • jonathankoren 2y ago
      Well then, there's even less reason to pay the rent Stack Overflow was wanting.
      • kragen 2y ago
        agreed
• eli 2y ago
  This seems like a really bad way to handle what should have been a foreseeable problem
• SrslyJosh 2y ago
  Congrats to OpenAI (and the rest of the LLM bros) for creating negative incentives for sharing knowledge.
  • bcrosby95 2y ago
    ML gives a whole new meaning to "training your replacements".
    • fakedang 2y ago
      Coming to think of it, recent ML is just a scaled up version of Infosys, Wipro, etc. Shit quality answers for enterprises, now accessible for the masses.
  • atleastoptimal 2y ago
    What are the negative incentives? How would an LLM improving in capabilities harm those who shared their knowledge for free online at some point in the past?
    • dumbo-octopus 2y ago
      My experience is worth less if an AI can summon it at-will. It hasn't necessarily come down to this yet in the software industry, but in others (like animation), folks who were previously responsible for generating concept art have found themselves without jobs as management can get "good enough" results from a much cheaper medium (that was, at least en-masse, trained on their "prior art"). I don't personally have a well formed opinion one way or another on this, but to dismiss the existence of a issue at all is logically lacking.
      • kragen 2y ago
        the same reasoning would equally justify the claim that your experience is worth less if beginner programmers can summon it at will; if you believe that reasoning you wouldn't have contributed to stackoverflow in the first place. i don't and if you contributed to stackoverflow you didn't either
• fabian2k 2y ago
  The OpenAI partnership doesn't really affect the core issue here around users deleting their content. That has never been welcome on Stack Overflow and when noticed usually was reversed. This is in accordance with the license as far as I understand the legal aspects, and in general it makes sense for me as it ensures that the content stays useful. The content is also CC-BY-SA, which is much better than what you get on essentially every other large site that hosts community content. But the same license also means that you cannot remove that content again, even if Stack Overflow would allow that anyone else can scrape it or download it before it is deleted and reproduce it according to the license. Users still can remove their name from their posts, and if they write personal details those can be redacted as well. But you can't remove good quality content from the sites later, that is likely to be reverted.
  • Hizonner 2y ago
    The problem isn't that Stack Overflow is allowing people to scrape the content. The problem is that Stack Overflow is preventing some people from scraping the content, in order to collect money from others. And, incidentally, passing zero of that money on to the people who actually created the content. (Nearly) none of the people who are presently pissed off would have complained if Stack Overflow had continued to allow all comers to scrape the content and train LLMs on it, nor if Stack Overflow had released the entire finished collection of content under the same CC-BY-SA license that was demanded of each contributor. With the OpenAI partnership, and similar shenanigans leading up to it, Stack Overflow is relying on obscure technicalities to violate the essential spirit of the original deal.
    • theendisney 2y ago
      I dont get how you can release something under anything other than all rights reserved without identification. We need to be able to persecute you in case you are not the author. Or is it that i may republish anything under any license?? It could be that the platform licences it in the toss but with cc are they not obligated to make it available without obstructie?
      • 2y ago
• mixedmath 2y ago
  About 5 years ago, StackOverflow messed up and declared that they were making all content submitted by users available under CC-BY-SA 4.0 [1]. The error here is that the users-content agreement was that all users' contributions are made available under CC-BY-SA 3.0 (and not anything about later). In the middle there were also some licensing problems concerning code vs noncode that were confusing. I remember thinking that if any of the super answerers really wanted, they could have tried to sue for illegally making their answers available under a different license. But I thought that without any damages, this probably wasn't likely to succeed. But now I wonder whether making all content available to AI scrapers and OpenAI in particular might be enough to actually base a case. As far as I can tell, StackOverflow continued being duplicitous with what license applies to what content for half of the year 2018 and the first few months of the year 2019. Their current licensing suggests CC-BY-SA 3.0 for things before May 5 2018, and CC-BY-SA 4.0 for things after. Sometime in early 2019 (if memory serves, it was after the meta post I link to), they made users login again and accept a new license agreement for relicensing content. But those middle months are murky. I should emphasize that I know nothing. [1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333089/205676 https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333089/205676
  • kragen 2y ago
    > if any of the super answerers really wanted, they could have tried to sue for illegally making their answers available under a different license. they can plausibly sue people other than stackoverflow if they attempt to reuse the answers under a different license. but i think it's very difficult to find a use that 4.0 permits that 3.0 doesn't
    • StevenXC 2y ago
      3.0 has a "bug" that makes it risky to use materials without very careful attribution: https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator-5f6360713299 https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-...
      • miohtama 2y ago
• atleastoptimal 2y ago
  The problem is whether people see programming as a zero-sum or positive sum enterprise. In the real world, it acts as a positive sum enterprise: one person's contribution benefits themselves and all those who use or learn from the code. However many gatekeeping-type people view it, perhaps instinctively, as zero-sum. They imagine that OpenAI benefitting from this partnership, or any amount of learning via web-scraping their models perform, necessarily harms those who put their content online. This in a nonsensical argument yet has garnered a fair amount of support due to the somewhat reflexive anti-AI sentiment as of late, which is separated from the more nuanced concerns of existential threats due to AI.
  • zb3 2y ago
    Positive-sum rarely exists in this world.. after all, one's wealth determines their influence over others. Both sides might gain but this usually means others lose. In this case, contributors might lose attribution. SO might lose traffic but they'll be compensated. Contributors won't so eventually there might be no reason to contribute anymore..
    • jonathankoren 2y ago
      It’s simply false that positive sum doesn’t exist the real world. Even the most simplistic trade argument in remedial Econ 101, or even Bio 101 reveals this. What’s rare are zero-sum games.
      • zb3 2y ago
        Rising inequality suggests otherwise
        • kolinko 2y ago
          If I'm not mistaken, the whole society is getting wealthier, it's just some people are getting wealthier faster than the others - so it's still a sum-positive. Here are the source charts: https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-income-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-income-inequality
• FireBeyond 2y ago
  This article is extremely biased towards SO: > Stack Overflow and OpenAI have joined forces through a new API partnership. This collaboration aims to provide developers with a powerful combination of Stack Overflow’s vast knowledge platform and OpenAI’s advanced AI models. Through the OverflowAPI access, OpenAI users will benefit from accurate and verified data from Stack Overflow, facilitating quicker problem-solving and enabling technologists to focus on priority tasks. Additionally, OpenAI will integrate validated technical knowledge from Stack Overflow into ChatGPT, enhancing users’ access to reliable information and code. Come on. Was this taken from a Press Release? > it can be disruptive to the entire community to delete or remove content that might be useful to someone else. Even if this content is no longer useful to you as the author. [sic] > As for the rest of us Stack Overflow users, I would not recommend jumping to delete your own content in protest too. > To be fair to Stack Overflow, the warning email and suspending of accounts is likely not a new thing. I can't find a negative word about SO in this entire article, so "to be fair" doesn't seem meaningful.
  • nicklecompte 2y ago
    If you check the byline, the author is a Microsoft MVP / product evangelist. So I don't think he's biased towards SO so much as he is biased towards anyone doing business with Microsoft (or OpenAI). He also seems very pro-GitHub Copilot.
• HappyPanacea 2y ago
  I suspect they will fail to emphasize the ShareAlike property of CC BY-SA 2.5/3.0/4.0 which is incredibly strong - "ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original". This is an incredibly wide and vague definition, especially "build upon" which will be unattractive to many users.
  • rodgerd 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • paulryanrogers 2y ago
      It was especially hilarious to watch the CTO of OpenAI get asked if they scrape YouTube, and could not say yes or no [0]. Possibly one of the most important sites in the Internet, and they're CTO claims ignorance. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1bfa7s3/openai_cto_mira_murati_confirms_that_the_video/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1bfa7s3/openai_cto...
  • nox101 2y ago
    I suspect, if ChatGPT quotes an answer or a snippet it will show attribution and a license for snippet. If it instead only uses the knowledge it gained from the answer/snippet and writes it's own answer, then, just like a human, it won't attribute
• ChrisArchitect 2y ago
  [dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297027
• LouisSayers 2y ago
  I'm actually perfectly fine if StackOverflow wants to sell an answer I made to help train AI. For me, the purpose of providing an answer is to help save others (and my future self) time, and I don't really mind if someone uses that in a private product - especially if it helps tools like ChatGPT which provide an insane amount of value given the low monthly price.
  • uberman 2y ago
    The price to get an answer from stack overflow is usually free as most questions have already been asked and answered. You dont even need an account.
    • wrsh07 2y ago
      They do serve ads, we should probably stop pretending "funded by ads" is the same as free. Your attention isn't free.
      • ssl-3 2y ago
        Suppose I walk up to a tent at a festival that has a big sign that says "FREE BEER", and I ask a person there for a beer. They hand me a beer, and I go on my way. Was the beer free? I think was free. Now, suppose I walk up to a Budweiser-branded tent at a Budweiser festival that has a big sign with a Budweiser logo on it that says "FREE BEER", and I ask a person there who is wearing a Budweiser polo shirt, a Budweiser lanyard, and a Budweiser hat for a beer. They hand me a beer in a Budweiser-branded cup, and I go on my way. Was the beer free? I think that both of these beers were free.
        • aspenmayer 2y ago
          Unironically, folks are being triggered by trigger warnings now.[1] Imagine how “free” the beer in your hypothetical scenario is to an alcoholic struggling to stay sober. Capitalism commoditizes even protest against it and repackages it as a product or service. None of this is to assign blame to good faith actors in a so-called free market, nor is it to abdicate responsibility on behalf of so-called free agents. Just a counterpoint. [1] https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/what-do-trigger-warnings-actually https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/what-do-trigger-warnings-actua...
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• chmaynard 2y ago
  Stack Overflow has been assimilated. Resistance is futile. It served a useful purpose but now it's part of the glorious AI universe to come. Rest in peace.
  • Reason077 2y ago
    The knowledge that's baked into those LLMs comes from sites like Stack Overflow. Without them, how can the LLMs learn new things?
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • hirvi74 2y ago
      That also means there is probably a lot of wrong information on Stack Overflow that is baked into the training too. Hopefully, they accounted for this in training, but no way of knowing. I have not really had a lot of accuracy issues with GPT, but then again, I probably and not savvy enough to spot them, most of the time, anyway.
    • umvi 2y ago
      SO isn't the only source. Official docs/wikis, GitHub issues, etc, are also good knowledge sources.
    • VelesDude 2y ago
      That is the big question with LLM's. How can we tell what is being fed in is original content or just the output fed back in like a recursive fractal?
    • akira2501 2y ago
      If it's posted on stack overflow, it's not new, it's merely been published. If this is the bar for LLM "learning" then they are doomed to live in a hazy bubble of the recent past.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• pornel 2y ago
  StackOverflow has always been quite open that they're primarily building a dataset for SEO, rather than being a user-centered website. So I don't feel this deal changed much. SO users are still serfs building them a dataset for sale, only the buyer has changed. LLMs are faster and infinitely more patient than interaction with StackOverflow, so I don't expect SO to survive for long. They're in crisis regardless whether they sell to OpenAI or not, so they may as well get something out of it before they're decimated.
  • theteapot 2y ago
    I think they're in crisis because they sold out there community not because LLMs are better. As a developer, if you offer me StackOverflow vs ChatGPT, I'd take StackOverflow any day of the week 100x over.
    • Jimmc414 2y ago
      Respectfully, how would you know if you never use ChatGPT?
      • theteapot 2y ago
        I said I don't use it. I didn't say I've never used it. In my experience browsing SO is way easier, more accurate, more precise, more controllable, navigable, and ... gives attribution.
        • fragmede 2y ago
          you spend more time on SO than me. without looking, can you name three stack overflow contributors? I can't.
          • theteapot 2y ago
            Yes.
          • selcuka 2y ago
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• casenmgreen 2y ago
  I left some time ago, and I'm very glad I did. I left because the staff behaved in a disingenuous manner. I found when leaving, as mentioned in the article, that you are not allowed to delete accepted posts, so you can't delete your content, should you come to think SO objectionable and wish your content not to be there. I can't see now why anyone would spend time posting answers there.
  • zerocrates 2y ago
    I don't love them getting into bed with AI, but also don't think it's unreasonable for them to not allow angry users to blank out their prior submissions. The whole deal was that you basically donated your posts and CC-licensed them. I wouldn't begrudge Wikipedia from similarly dealing with upset editors who went around blanking the articles they contributed to or reverting all their changes.
    • Retric 2y ago
      Wikipedia editors aren’t the sole source of their pages. I am fine with people leaving and deleting their posts because they may feel the information will become outdated without being maintained. SO unfortunately is actively hostile to correcting outdated information. Which is somewhat understandable as recognizing how little long term value answers provide undermines their moat. The site has basically become worthless for JavaScript due to such rot which helps explain why they are trying to cash out on the AI side of things.
      • arp242 2y ago
        Many answers have been edited, commented on, and reviewed by others. So it's also not exactly a one-person show either. Outdated info is a problem, but not so easy to solve; I have answers from Ruby on Rails 4 era that are still perfectly valid today. Others may not be. Also remember that people sometimes stay on old versions for a long time. I don't know what the best solution is, but destroying information is not it.
        • 2y ago
• ProjectArcturis 2y ago
  Is there anyone who makes stackoverflow their first stop for programming questions anymore?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • int_19h 2y ago
    Google ranks it pretty high, so it is the de facto first stop for many.
    • ProjectArcturis 2y ago
      Ah. I've found various LLMs are much easier to query and generally nicer than SO posters, so it's been quite a while since I've needed to visit SO. I assumed most people had made a similar journey.
      • jazzyjackson 2y ago
        ur in a bubble, harry
    • yesiamyourdad 2y ago
      Not so much anymore though. I've seen over the last year that SO ranks lower and content farms like geeks4geeks, Programiz, etc. are getting much higher in results.
  • notatoad 2y ago
    i still google things, mostly out of habit. but i'd say half the time i visit stack overflow, the answer i get there is either outdated or too opinionated to be useful and i end up going to chatGPT.
• fardo 2y ago
  This bodes poorly for the future of SO. One of the reasons that Quora today is absolutely unusable is that it no longer is a curated discussion between internet users and knowledgeable people, but AI spamming the site with swarms of low-quality questions, and AI answering those questions with swarms of low-quality answers. I think it's likely that Stack Overflow will end up following a similar pattern.
  • esafak 2y ago
    I don't think so: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/policy-generative-ai-e-g-chatgpt-is-banned https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/policy-gener...
    • suby 2y ago
      Good luck enforcing that.
      • esafak 2y ago
        If a human can detect it, it can be flagged. They already deal with human spam.
  • khazhoux 2y ago
    I know this wasn’t really your point, but it’s worth noting that Quora being low quality spam is not the problem. It’s why the hell Google surfaces Quora so prominently given that the results are pure shit and require registration to even see all the shit. Is there any reasonable explanation for how they’re ranked so high? Like, how can even googlers tolerate it?
    • tyingq 2y ago
      Just a guess, but I think when they started losing the spam wars they put in some kind of handcrafted whitelist ranking boost, either directly based on brand/site, or link proximity to known good sites, etc. And maybe they don't update that list too often. You can find some info about an ML update Google called "Vince" that sounds a lot like that.
• firecall 2y ago
  I'm surprised OpenAI hasnt just crawled all of SO already?
• arp242 2y ago
  dupe: StackOverflow is banning accounts that delete answers in protest against OpenAI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297027 - May 2024 (103 comments)
• extheat 2y ago
  I am thankful we have LLMs so we don't have to deal with SO. Ideally, as little as possible. SO can be a pretty toxic place filled with elitism and care for procedure over actually helping people, which is not totally unreasonable from their standpoint but it's definitely not what people are visiting the site for. Quite ironically, one of the major complaints I get is that LLMs output wrong answers here and there, ignoring that many of the answers on SO are also completely wrong or irrelevant to the core question being asked. And mind you, also outdated (I regularly have to click through the sorting to make sure answers are actually still relevant). If we could merge the two to get the best of both worlds, and have LLMs that know how to write well and are validated by humans on the site, that would be great. Maybe not great for the folks looking to accrue internet points but absolutely great for users.
  • tyingq 2y ago
    That's great for now. It's not clear to me, though, where LLM's will get their training data from here forward without ingesting lots of LLM generated code and answers and eating it's own tail.
    • cle 2y ago
      OpenAI and Microsoft get TONS of user-written code w/ quality feedback, OpenAI through ChatGPT and Microsoft through VS Code and Copilot.
      • prng2021 2y ago
        That's only now and in the near term future. If AI is actually successful, every year the amount of human written code will decrease. That's the whole point of this.
    • BenFranklin100 2y ago
      Didn’t you get the memo? LLM’s either already are capable of or just a step away from being able to reason so no need for human generated training data in the future. Or at least that’s what 3/4 of HN commentators believe and all AI CEOs want you to believe.
• astrodust 2y ago
  It is nearly impossible to delete an accepted answer you don't want to have any more. I've had several which are wildly out of date and incorrect now and I don't want to update them, but the mods refuse to remove them.
  • leumon 2y ago
    You can request to dissociate them from your account. (better then nothing)
  • jazzyjackson 2y ago
    can't you just comment on the post informing people who land there that its out of date? id prefer that over following a cached link and hitting a 404
• stainablesteel 2y ago
  SO has been doing the absolute worst things to squander their amazing lead for years i haven't used that website since GPT came out, and now i contribute nothing to it but i'm glad all of its content ended up training the models that put it out of business, thanks SO! you'll never be anything other than user contributions
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • lannisterstark 2y ago
    As dour as it sounds, I am in a similar boat. Who'd have thought that not needlessly getting called names when you ask a question (even if it's dumb -as that's how you learn) makes people less likely to interact with you. what's amusing to me is that some people even in this thread are calling it a pro, not a con. I guess our field does indeed attract a certain kind of personality.
• caesil 2y ago
  >Ben continues in his thread, "[The moderator crackdown is] just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit. It's just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you." Uh.... yeah, it's a company, not a charity. No one's forcing you to post on StackOverflow. No one's forcing you to buy a ChatGPT subscription.
  • readyman 2y ago
    Given the lack of an alternative, should we instruct the human instinct of sharing in the pursuit of knowledge to sacrifice itself or accept the risk of exploitation? If your sorry platitude is what we have to show for it, capitalism must go to Hell.
    • wordofx 2y ago
      > Given the lack of an alternative There are plenty of alternatives to everything. But no one uses them. Because why would they?
      • readyman 2y ago
        They wouldn't, because network effect, which is why there is no alternative.
  • Barrin92 2y ago
    >Uh.... yeah, it's a company, not a charity. While this is true sites like Stackoverflow very much only function because they create the illusion that it is in fact a "community". The moment they make explicit that there is monetary value in the knowledge people post on the site it becomes obvious that the users are, using Varoufakis term, technoserfs. You're very much never supposed to notice that Reddit, SO, and so on continously extract value out of work you produce, at worst you're maybe supposed to notice an ad or two. Because if you do notice that you might actually start asking why you aren't getting paid. Which is btw funnily enough exactly what news organizations and SO have realized vis-a-vis openAI.
• deleted 2y ago
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• Karellen 2y ago
  > Users are also asking why ChatGPT could not simply share the source of the answers it will dispense in this new partnership, both citing its sources and adding credibility to the tool. Of course, this would reveal how the sausage of LLMs is made What? Surely the answer to that question is that ChatGPT doesn't know where the source of its answers is, isn't it? Isn't the question itself based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work?
  • jarsin 2y ago
    I haven't used it extensively but when i ask a generic coding question in brave it gives me an ai response and it does list source websites. Not sure if it's the actual source or its just pulling them from a search or what.
    • _akhe 2y ago
      Could always perform a normal web search with the LLM result and show matches
  • squigglydonut 2y ago
    It "doesn't know" ;) nice.
• sva_ 2y ago
  It sounds like the measure of preventing users from deleting/editing their posts contradicts EU laws?
  • zarzavat 2y ago
    Only if they are putting their own personal information in their answers, which I assume they are not.
    • squigglydonut 2y ago
      Human answers are personal answers.
• SpaghettiX 2y ago
  I still use StackOverflow. Not as much as I used too, thanks to GPT, but still multiple times a day. What I find is that I spend less time on SO. However, IMHO deleting questions you originally wrote in the past is hurting other users more than it is hurting AI training. Other users cannot write similar answers to yours, because it doesn't add anything and they'd get downvoted or deleted. So if you hadn't written your answer years ago, others could've written something similar. Also, other users may have commented on your questions/answers. Their efforts would be lost/deleted if you deleted your questions/answers. Thanks for your previous contribution to the community. But I would say the worst you should be able to do is remove your name/anonymise your posts, not just delete them.
  • jncfhnb 2y ago
    Multiple times a day sounds like a massive amount to me…?
    • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      Looking through my browser history, I'd say that I average about 5 distinct SO posts per day. If you know there will be an answer it's less typing to search for it than it is to have ChatGPT regenerate it.
  • Ekaros 2y ago
    I wonder would actually deleting questions be a good thing. If there is no old question the same question asked again can not possibly be a duplicate... So constant loop of deleting questions might actually be effective way to fix some problems. And there is enough off-site backups already.
• Linda231 2y ago
  [dead]
• bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
  No empathy for users to spend their time contributing to a corporate walled garden and who to top it off get emotionally invested in it.
• osigurdson 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• s1k3s 2y ago
  Haha, what's that gonna do? Ever heard of soft delete? It's a thing where even if you delete something off a website, the database still retains that information even though it becomes inaccessible by the public. Everything we write on the web is like that, including this very comment.
  • notatoad 2y ago
    even if it were a hard delete, do these people think OpenAI is scraping the live version of the site? the answers have already been exported. all you're doing by deleting it is ensuring it's only available on ChatGPT, and no longer available to web users who aren't using AI tools that ingested the content before it was deleted.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • vsuperpower2020 2y ago
    It lowers the value of the site if people stop answering and sabotage their existing answers in protest. Does that make sense? Do you understand?
• deleted 2y ago
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• jarsin 2y ago
  Does anyone know if chatGPT etc could code without stackoverlow answers? I think that is the big question, because the license seems it's going to give lawyers a very wide attack surface to go after every ai coder out there if they all need SO database.
  • tintor 2y ago
    There is plenty of code and bug trackers on the web for ChatGPT to learn from: OSS, Github, Sourceforge, ...
• yesiamyourdad 2y ago
  I have very few SO contributions so I don't have much at stake personally, but I have observed that there was a trend of people using their SO profiles for career advancement. I'd see people reference their SO activity on resumes and I had job applications ask for my SO profile if I had one, and I've seen advice that a good SO profile was valuable the way a good Github profile is. Is that something people factor in to their decision to delete? And isn't that social capital a kind of compensation for their contributions?
  • deleted 2y ago
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• Qem 2y ago
  Wonder if Wikimedia Foundation couldn't just take the opportunity, now that Stack Overflow is alienating their userbase, to launch a rival Q&A site. I was always puzzled why did they never attempt to enter this space, even before Stack Overflow, given their prior experience in crowdsourced information commons.
  • YPPH 2y ago
    Pragmatically, the software powering most their properties, MediaWiki, is not suited for it. It's hard to see them investing in development of a new platform given uncertainties of success.
  • deleted 2y ago
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• highwayman47 2y ago
  Why? They don’t want the knowledge to be more accessible to the masses all of the sudden? Also, all those answers are backed up somewhere.
  • paulryanrogers 2y ago
    Perhaps they don't want their answers to be systematically leveraged to put them out of work. Though considering the site terms and CC license, I don't think deleting will actually help much.
• deleted 2y ago
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  • deleted 2y ago
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• a2128 2y ago
  I find it deeply troubling that platforms are becoming so hostile that users are having to strike against the owners by mass deleting their content. And then the platforms handle this by simply undeleting the content and banning them from continuing to delete any more (StackOverflow, Reddit) This may also be legally dubious in Europe as, while the authors may have granted copy rights to the platform owners, they still maintain their moral rights which may apply in this case (IANAL)
  • iamkonstantin 2y ago
    I just submitted a request to have all my content removed from SO and will challenge the outcome if needed. My right to be forgotten and have my content deleted supersedes SO’s dubious, “nobody really reads these” terms and conditions.
    • popcorncowboy 2y ago
      Great idea. Have done the same.
      • MissTake 2y ago
        I’m not convinced yet that GDPR covers things. GDPR is focused on PII and anything that can identify you directly or indirectly as an individual. If your posts start with “My name is Jane Doe and this is my post” then that would be one thing. However from everything I’ve been able to ascertain, your average forum post is unlikely to be covered, save from anonymizing the email address etc. Granted there are certain things that can lead to deanonymization, in the case of forum posts I’m unsure how far that goes. It’s a myth that the GDOR “right to be forgotten” is an absolute. I also suspect that creating anonymized IDs and attributing that ID to each thread would be enough to get past such attempts to link posts to PII.
  • deleted 2y ago
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• keefle 2y ago
  Side related question: are there content licenses coming up that are similar in spirit to what the GPL is but targeted at AI training? (E.g. if this piece of content was used in training an AI that was to be used commercially, the AI's weights must be published)
  • progval 2y ago
    The argument AI companies make is that LLMs are not derived works of their input, or is fair use. So according to them, the input's license does not matter.
    • postepowanieadm 2y ago
      Do you have any sources about that, I'm just curious:)
      • _xivi 2y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37780199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37780199
• Beldin 2y ago
  Hmmms. While I definitely can see SO's arguments concerning deletion, that letter seems to blatantly contradict GDPR's right to be forgotten, which Wikipedia describes as a more limited "right to data erasure" [1]. To coin a Dutch phrase: I cannot make chocolate out of that. Anyone here have an idea how to bring these two points together? Other than the obvious "wrt. EU inhabitants, SO is lying", that is. Or is it really that simple? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten - under "European Union"
• witoong623 2y ago
  Thank to people who delete their answers, now I have to pay OpenAI to find answers they already scraped. Talking about helping OpenAI making more money :(
• m463 2y ago
  What I don't understand is in CC-BY-SA, SA means share alike. Does openai have to share their models?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• rich_sasha 2y ago
  I guess the core issue was always having a for-profit company preside over a "free" product. Clearly, they have to make money, and they aren't bound by ethics of open source. Contributors may feel like they are contributing to a FOSS project, but they aren't. What Stack exchange is doing is probably legal (?) and that's the bar they need to clear. The contributors aren't stakeholders and SE only needs to retain enough of them to sustain themselves commercially. There's been more than a decade of companies now providing something for free, while they figure out how to monetize it, and these always scare me a little, because its always going to end up like this. Users of Facebook becoming eyeballs for ads, GitHub users providing free data for LLMs, SE selling data to Open AI... If a product is free, then you are the product. And if you don't know how you are monetized, you're going to be disappointed by it sooner or later.
  • squigglydonut 2y ago
    Harsh but true. I think what stings about SO is that developers are the ones losing here. I think this will prompt less open source and encourage more private work. I hope people are seeing that they are being take advantage of on many fronts.
• juleiie 2y ago
  It’s probably time for a pro publico bono stack overflow alternative. When money is involved those things tend to destroy themselves sooner or later. And why would SO even profit from the hard work of thousands of volunteers. It doesn’t seem very ethical.
  • squigglydonut 2y ago
    Given how the industry has treated tech workers, this will be exploited. I'm interested in joining a private group with or without profit motive, that is not open source.
• squigglydonut 2y ago
  Your knowledge work is being exploited. If you don't allow Open AI to train it's subscription product on your open source contributions, you will get banned.
• kshaibani 2y ago
  I code daily, and I don't remember the last time I used Stack Overflow in the past 2 years.
• yungporko 2y ago
  stackoverflow users being dicks and preventing people from gaining knowledge? who could have ever seen this coming?