@nixCraft
So sad to see them selling the collective soul

@nixCraft to be completely fair, I would be incredibly surprised (and I am trying to be charitable due to lack of concrete evidence) if OpenAI hasn't scanned every single SO question and answer ever made already. This was probably made so they would have ChatGPT answers on popular questions and stuff like that, which of course is still bad

@nixCraft@mastodon.social nooooooooooo

@nixCraft This is sad

OpenAI, Mircosoft, and Google together kill the open web. Thousands of independent blogs and forums are now nowhere in search engines or pushed back to page two to support their AI and partnerships with Reddit, StackOverflow, and more. Many humans contributed to these sites hoping to build a knowledge base for humanity, but now greedy people like Sama and OpenAI are taking over everything.

@nixCraft Whut

@nixCraft

Real Talk: if Stack Overflow dies, we'll all be out of our tech jobs. The most common questions can't be answered by reading manpages.

@nixCraft

Lets be real they did it already long time ago.
This is just to make it "legal".
Their answers are still bad

@nixCraft

@nixCraft Or, if you are feeling mischievous, get a group of friends together and invent a nonsense programming language and then ask and answer questions about it that sound right but are utter boffo.

@nixCraft

good riddance

@nixCraft I am done for, deleting all my posts, gl with that SO

@nixCraft didn't they forbid the use of any ai generated answers?

@nixCraft How about we take to the streets and start burning down cities? Don't exaggerate, let's not avoid the inevitable. This is the future

@nixCraft I think they've always been allowed to just send off that data for scraping, thanks to permissive licensing and what started out as an unwillingness to do anything about it.

Heck, this comment even mentions the ability for AI companies to turn a profit on it.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/424299/stack-overflow-is-no-longer-providing-creative-commons-data-dumps/424312#424312

It was only a matter of time, @nixCraft . For the record, I don't think deleting profiles, questions and answers will do anything more than hurt human beings, right now. It's too late. It was already too late before LLM bots became realistically applicable for this grift because the corporations already had the content.

We wrote that content – me too! – freely, willing to aid and help our human peers who suffered from the problems we sought to answer and we did it in the hope for a better www.

@nixCraft Well we already knew that most of GPT's answers were scraped from stackoverflow, but somehow this makes it even worse.

@nixCraft Wow! Doesn't this mean that the company will now die a slow death once all their databases have been incorporated into #ChatGPT? On the one hand, this seems like a really stupid move, but on the other hand, I reckon that this deal is actually the only real choice they have left, as all their data has probably already been crawled by the best #LLMs before. At least they can gain a bit of money from #OpenAI in the short term before becoming completely obsolete in a few months to years. 😢

@nixCraft this is also the company that laid off a bunch of folks (including my wife) right before the holidays. So fuckem

For the record, what actually happens if you delete your account, @nixCraft ? If deleting an account means that the body of questions and answers is also deleted from the public facing StackOverflow (bzw. all Stack Exchange) pages, then this might present a threat to tech entirely!

When last did you meet someone who doesn't rely on Stack pages for reference?

They are often better than official docs. For older stuff, docs might also be long gone. There's a lot of "inside" knowledge, there, too.

@nixCraft If openai can build a better chatgpt based on a reliable source, why not? I don't think there's harm to anybody

@nixCraft
Now OpenAI can downvote and mark your question as "possible duplicate" faster than any human could do.

@nixCraft why stackoverflow?? I thought they forbid generated answers on their website and now they start creating a partnership!?

@nixCraft already done, because of moderation bullies

@nixCraft@mastodon.social I find most of the content dated, or inaccurate now. That's not going to be useful for AI learning!

@nixCraft ... Seriously? 😒

@nixCraft the human touch where guys voted you down for the smallest things?!

@nixCraft So excited to get 4 different outdated solutions all stitched together, none of which work to address my current problem.

This is such a shitty idea!!! omg

@nixCraft
No part of the corporate web is sacred. We've learned that lesson enough :(

@nixCraft All user contributions to SO are CC-BY-SA licensed:

https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

I wonder how OpenAI will deal with the attribution requirement.

@nixCraft can't wait for every answer on the site to be wrong from now on

@nixCraft I don't understand how this infection is still spreading.

@nixCraft Noooooo! 😭​

👁️​ @bison

@nixCraft The community was toxic there anyways. I delete my account a long time ago after I was downvoted to oblivion for not investigating if the question(!) was a duplicate. Writing the answer took me less than a minute, searching for a duplicate would have taken way more time.

@nixCraft@mastodon.social Well shit

@nixCraft I doubt they will

@nixCraft It didn't take them long to go from "stop using ChatGPT to generate rubbish answers" to "wait how much did you say we can sell you human generated answers for?"

@nixCraft Deleting your profile and stopping contributions is a valid protest, but deleting your answers only exacerbates the problem.

Even if OpenAI doesn’t already have your answers (unlikely), Stack Overflow has backups and public dumps. Meaning that by deleting your answers, the only ones with access to them will the AI tools; humans accessing Stack Overflow won’t. That’s the opposite of the goal.

@nixCraft as much as this sucks please don't advise people to delete their existing answers. Not contributing new answers and not logging in are a great way to register protest.

These companies already have the data backed up and will use it anyway, deleting answers only hurts humans who are searching for the answers through traditional searches.

I sincerely implore you to edit your call to action and help keep the information "public", deleting it makes it available ONLY for the "AI".

@nixCraft if you cant beat 'em, join 'em

fr though this will fill my search results with weird hallucinated code

@nixCraft Codidact.org is not partnered with AI and is trying to replace Stack Exchange for this reason

@nixCraft that seems related

@nixCraft Oh FFS. Can sites please just stop selling stuff they didn’t create to these grifters.

@nixCraft @gearlicious NO. PLEASE. STOP IT WITH DELETING ANSWERS.

It's bad enough that people did this with fucking Reddit and now my search results get peppered with useless links to Reddit threads that used to have pertinent questions and answers but don't anymore!!

Doing this makes it SO MUCH HARDER to search for answers for ANYTHING now!!!! >:(

@nixCraft I, the complete nerd came to tell you that libera.chat and freenode.net still exist.

edit: libera.chat, not .net

@nixCraft

It's like saying stop editing Wikipedia because companies are using it to teach LLMs.

All StackOverflow user content is distributed under CC BY-SA 4.0

@nixCraft but but but I love my insecure PHP4 answers!

@nixCraft not sure I agree, I think an AI can be a giant jerkface to newbies the same as the humans were doing.

@nixCraft

Incredibly disappointing :(

@nixCraft Link to tweet: https://twitter.com/StackOverflow/status/1787467736097939562

@nixCraft people who claim that deleting answers will "hurt humanity"

People. I don't want to live in your version of humanity :AngeryCat:

@nixCraft Stack Overflow has been utterly useless to me for years. To be blunt, if I can't solve a problem from the vendor's documentation, it is the vendor's problem, not the user's or the community's.

@nixCraft
and nobody is worried about the feedback loop that this effectively creates.. future LLMs are going to increasingly get their training data from the garbage the current ones are spewing out and spamming the web with..
lets just hope dumbification isn't too far gone when the bubble bursts

@nixCraft

On the contrary, it's time to start posting more questions and answers on SO.

I need to share all my knowledge of the new powershell cmdlet get-streamEditor, which has an alias of sed and allows graphical editing of video streams.

@nixCraft at this point I'd rather see Terminator 2 AI robot apocalypse than every asshat VC backed startup under the sun coopting all our shit to make cash hand over fist and then resell our own stuff repackaged under "AI" banner back to us for a mandatory subscription. No one's gonna stop using SO, like no one stopped using Github, like no one stopped using Reddit. Grim corporate bullshit future, fuck all this.

@nixCraft

@nixCraft are they hosted in Microsoft datacenters?

@nixCraft This is how capital and even the world work. Some people just build the platform, and everything else is waiting for most people to build.

@nixCraft now is the time where always having been to lazy to get seriously involved anywhere pays off, in a weird way.

@nixCraft AI is going to use the preferred answer in Stack Overflow? Be afraid, be very afraid.

@nixCraft To add insult to injury, these are the same guys who initially banned AI-generated answers.

@nixCraft the enshitification as coined by @pluralistic of the web is progressing at an exponential rate now.

When is somebody going to build a federated alternative to those sites?

@nixCraft
I started deleting my questions and answers from #StackOverflow but it's not so easy:

> You have already deleted 5 of your own posts today; further deletes are blocked.

Also, I am not allowed to delete accepted answers.

@nixCraft How it started: How it's going:

@nixCraft@mastodon.social So realistically answers will be gone from the public facing site but still available to OpenAI. Where will the SO users end up then?

@nixCraft
Too bad. Did not see that coming. But then I never do.

@nixCraft I think stopping contributions to SO is one thing. Building an alternative is another which should be addressed.

So maybe something like that can be done in a federalized or even decentralized way? People searching for the questions could share answers if they were helpful. So the better the answers the easier you could request them. Similar as torrent...

I think the main problem to solve would be making it easily searchable via tags, keywords and similarity calculation.

@nixCraft another one bites the dust..

@nixCraft@mastodon.social so, SO, with a previous agony inducing responses from humans, is going to get agony and anxiety inducing responses? marvelous!

@nixCraft yes! remove all answers so we cannot found any useful stuff about OSes, apps and hardware from 10years ago...

@nixCraft

'tis already blacklisted from my search engine. :)

https://clew.se

@nixCraft
As we can expect quality to drop steeply from this point, wanted to mention that the kiwix project maintains archives of stack exchange as well as wikipedia meant for self-hosted offline viewing; e.g.
https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&q=&category=stack_exchange

@nixCraft Looking forward to ChatGPT going "This question has been answered before, locked."

@nixCraft I stopped contributing when they mishandled Monica's policy questions and fired Monica without following their own policy.

@nixCraft #stackoverthrow !! LoL

@nixCraft 'delete all your answers'? so people rely on LLMs more? the solution isn't that easy

@nixCraft I hope there is a way to back up all of that stuff first though!

@nixCraft I have to admit: When I need help with code, I usually go straight to ChatGPT, whereas I used to go to stackoverflow.

@nixCraft So, now you can get an LLM answer, that matches some of the key words in your question, amalgamated from several highly ranked previous answers, but without any of the context or discussions, and a sprinkling of hallucinations?

Who thinks this is an improvement?

@nixCraft

What should have been done is :

1. keeping SO as is. Humans' contribution only.

2. Build another entity, called for example "SO AI", from scratch with both human and non human posts and works and interactions, knowing perfectly who is doing what. What's more this could end up developing uncommon and unexpected results.

This was the right way.

Get in touch SO, i'll give you some salutary advices!

@nixCraft I may be the outlier but I never enjoyed #stackoverflow . So many times I tried to upvote an answer, or to submit a correct one, but never seemed to reach their "bar". Last I saw you could download a local copy, I'll probably do that again and try to self host.

@nixCraft so that means ChatGPT will start responding "never mind, I figured it out" to every super specific question about software

@nixCraft (and move them to lemmy or something)

@nixCraft that'd mean a huge loss in programming knowledge, so I personally don't think it's wise to delete all answers even if this is happening

@nixCraft
even if we did, our answers are already #SO's property, aren't they? Deleted answers are available to users with enough privilege (e.g., I see them), and SO can let any AI roam their assets freely, unfortunately. Nor do I think we would have the numbers to make a difference :-(

@nixCraft Money talk.

@nixCraft I'm excited for all of these nonsense vortices to start answering 'duplicate question, closed' to any query.

@nixCraft I haven't contributed for a long time. I use it because it is a slightl ymore reliable source than some others (for the specific, peculiar things I need).

I have been more circumspect of the last year, and will be even more so.

Enshitification central

@nixCraft RIP. Nice to have been there...

@nixCraft I don't think I'll particularly miss the "human touch" of stingy individuals powertripping on the karma system.

@nixCraft I received this passive aggressive email in response to my deletion of 5 (the max) posts.

"Because of the amount of disruption these incidents can cause, we have placed your account on hold for 7 days while we reach out to you to avoid any further misunderstandings. Once this matter has been resolved, your reputation score will be restored and your account will resume as normal."

Too bad, my account is already scheduled for deletion, and they'll probably keep my posts either way.