> But if you don't get virtual points as appreciation [unpaid contract labor]... then sharing knowledge is not your main, but secondary goal. Your main goal is

> But if you don't get virtual points as appreciation [unpaid contract labor]... then sharing knowledge is not your main, but secondary goal. Your main goal is the recognition. It's false dichotomy to parse out components of motivations; most SO users are motivated by a mix of altruism, sharing knowledge, some recognition, optionally linking to your profile/website/blog/resume/portfolio, getting job approaches and a dose of pride/ego/vanity. As a longtime SO user, that has historically been the bargain, when (most/)all of your submissions were directly seen by human end-users. As a plus, all of that gave you good SEO commensurate with your contributions. So, it's unreasonable to try to dichotomize into "users who mainly did it for the rep" vs ones who want to teach and share. But the 2023 and 2024 announcements are different: the future is your submissions will be used to train AIs; however SO doesn't seem to have devoted much thought to licensees like OpenAI complying with SO's attribution requirements [0] (attribution must cite individual URL of question/answer, and SO username, which then links onwards via your SO profile page to the items mentioned above). (If the AI synthesizes an answer derived from 5 separate SO items, do they guarantee to attribute all 5 items?) So the human eyeballs are being intermediated, your incentives to participate are evaporating, and that pretty much breaks SO's historical bargain with its user community. The next major bad development would be SO opening the floodgates on the moderation queue backlog of thousands of items of AI-generated content (which caused the 2023 moderator strike/resignations), much low-quality and arguably should be banned; if/when that feedback loop is closed, the results might well be unholy; certainly bona-fide human contributors will be marginalized and have less incentive. (and if AI were to be used for moderation, then that could be exploitable). Inbound views/hits on your content on SO either come from a) Google + other search engines b) SO's search itself c) attribution from OpenAI's ChatGPT d) attribution from other(/future) AI licensees. If your code is scraped once but effectively viewed 1 million times from GPT, you won't see those 1 million hits show up; you can only vaguely infer they might be happening if the attribution is actually implemented, and some users click through on it (or by reverse-querying the AI). So c),d) will proportionately increase as a),b) proportionately decrease. So everything has changed. And obviously the incentive to you to continue to provide unpaid volunteer labor ongoing without even attribution decreases. [0]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/#ref-appropriate-credit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/#ref-appropri...