One of the things that the Stack Overflow brouhaha demonstrates is that it doesn’t matter if a service was founded by people trusted by the community (Atwood and Spolsky) and was broadly community-led. If it’s a VC-funded startup, they will sell out their users at some point.
People keep forgetting that "by developers, for developers" was a big part of Stackoverflow's initial pitch. It was founded by people who most of the community implicitly trusted. They said all the right things. But as soon as they took VC-funding it was just a matter of time.
I think we know better now than to trust something like a VC-funded community site, but remember that SO was founded in 2008 at the tail-end of the Web 2.0 funding bubble
@baldur Also, if your VC pitch deck contains a section about you as a person being in control of a large and important community project, then is it a community project?
@raganwald@baldur The new turn is gross, but at least for now SO continues to make good on the purpose behind that: offering answers that aren’t incomplete until you paid for access. They’re peddling our work to this LLM trash but I’ll take the small favor that it continues to be CC shareable and open.
@donw
You know what continues to be sharable and open? forum.openwrt.org, discourse.julialang.org and similar. Stack Overflow is trash compared to most of them. And they are practically unfunded by comparison. @raganwald@baldur
And there is one difference between this enshittification and all others. We have the data, because we sold out to ourselves before we sold out to the VCs. I hope it can make a difference, but I won't be surprised if it doesn't. It's going to be incredibly difficult for a new Stack Overflow to grow in a world where search engines don't work.
Looks like 16.9 GiB for stackoverflow.com.sqlite.br (16.9GiB) and roughly 6 GiB for the rest. Maybe people running #SearXNG instances could add searches on data dumps like these?
@baldur "VC-funded startup" isn't even the only factor - plenty of cool projects started out with no VC funding, but then got acquired later in their life by private equity types. A clean start is no guarantee.
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