[b3morales]

This was one of the promises originally of Stack Overflow: all the content is Creative Commons licensed so that if they "turned evil" (I believe it was Joel that put it this way) the community could, in a way, create a fork. https://web.archive.org/web/20230203170609/https://stackover...

Unfortunately the dumps themselves are not a legal requirement, just a gentleman's agreement, so realistically exercising this ability was still at the whim of the company.

[redbell]

> This was one of the promises originally of Stack Overflow: all the content is Creative Commons licensed

This reminds me of the promise OpenAI was built on. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a bold claim to be respected and too good to be true [0]

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34979981

[isoprophlex]

Maybe just a gentlemen's agreement, but a nice canary too. Once the dumps stop, it's time to start waving middle fingers and GTFO.

[sshine]

I stopped answering questions when Monica got sacked as a moderator:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/393046/who-or-what-...

To me, this was the canary. Just another psychopath megacorp.

[version_five]

That kind of shit is poison. It's like there's a weakness in community run stuff that allows people to come in and co-opt it for their own agenda. I don't know that this is a corporate issue, it's an issue of people not pushing back because they don't want to get accused of anything and letting special interests walk all over them. It's happening everywhere. But I agree, no point on dealing with people who spend their time on this garbage.

[tremon]

a weakness in community run stuff

But the community is not running it: all the infrastructure is in the hands of a for-profit corporation. Contrast this with the Freenode/Libera split: because not just moderation but also hosting was done by the community, they could continue operations fairly quickly when Freenode turned evil.

So I guess that's the lesson we should learn from it (again): the community doesn't own shit if it does not run the daily operations.

[bombcar]

It’s starting to look like benevolent dictator is the way to go as that has at least a small chance of survival

[throwaway81523]

I dunno, look what happened to RMS.

[DANmode]

Torvalds, Micay

[theragra]

I always wonder why original founders just sell the company and do something else. Why don't they try to control it more and make sure it stays aligned with needs of society more? Either they can't because of shareholder/equity owners pressure, or they won't, because they really don't care and just said it for PR

[jzb]

I certainly wonder about the "do something else" in the sense of serial entrepreneurs. If I could cash in once I'd be done. If I had enough money to retire on, I would. Run a cat shelter or something.

But the actual answer here is probably a combo of a few things: One, running a company is probably not as much fun as building a company. Much of my career has been "pioneer" roles where nobody else has done the job before. At a certain point, the foundation is laid and the problems to solve are different and often less interesting -- at least to me. It's the build vs. maintain thing.

Two, they started with good and noble intentions. Money got involved. A lot of money got involved. The noble intentions were replaced with reality.

Three, have you met users? As a site grows you have to deal with more and more people and people can be very demanding and not very appreciative. Coupled with the previous factors, I think original founders get burnt out and decide to take the cash and move on. The allure of building anew is too much, the grind of maintenance is too much, and the cash is too good to pass up.

Also four... there's a peak for any site. You often don't know when or how, but you do now that someday your site's maximum value, interest, participation, and all that is going to peak and then decline. Sticking around to fight the good fight may just mean passing up a payday and being left with a declining property nobody wants anymore.

[glenngillen]

Probably 10-15 years ago now someone I new built a dev focussed B2B SaaS company that was quite successful. I’m not sure if they ever raised investment, but they were hyper efficient and definitely not following the VC model. Profitable, very small team, and that’s how they liked it. I compared notes with the founder regularly and found it very inspirational. He didn’t want to follow the typical VC model. He wanted to build a long term company that could sustain itself. I just loved everything about what they were doing and how well they were doing it.

And then one day, completely unexpectedly (to me) I read that they’ve been acquired by a private equity firm. I reached out to find out what happened and what changed. His answer was along the lines of “turns out everyone has an exit point after all. Priorities and motivations change and I’ve given this company everything I have to give it. It’s time to explore what’s next”

I think about it a lot. And I’ve witnessed it in various ways numerous time since. People that were hacking on a side project with the idea of “I just want this to be a fun passive income stream” seeing the adoption and love their work gets suddenly thinking “oh my, there’s potential here I didn’t see before! I could build a whole team and company around this… let’s go raise investment!”.

I think we’re just really bad predictors at how achieving the things we want will impact us emotionally. When we reach those milestones we react either more positive or more negatively than we could understand previously.

[Sakos]

And yet you get people like Zuckerberg who'll stick around until the end. It's not like he cares about users or connecting people beyond them being a means to grow the company. Yet he saw through the company from its founding to the gigantic megacorp it is now, and it doesn't seem like hell ever want to quit. Why didn't he quit? It's not like his users are any more appreciative and he's far from beloved by anybody.

[xu_ituairo]

Maybe it’s because he can stay in pioneer mode, doing new things like Libra, VR etc.

Maybe in some businesses pioneering is less likely (by nature, or the corporate culture) like Stack Overflow making inroads into crypto or VR or AI.

[bombcar]

When you have more money than God you measure success in different ways. One of which is to try to be a Steve Jobs or other famous business celebrity.

[towawy]

…or they might have determined that they‘d rather spend their time on something else.

Keeping control is a (mostly time) commitment and liability. You have to stay on top of things and actively decide on issues that inadvertently come up.

[Diesel555]

> Either they can't because of shareholder/equity owners pressure, or they won't, because they really don't care and just said it for PR

That is assuming the worst in people. Have you ever wanted to move onto something new? If you make something cool, it is not your lifelong obligation to oversee it.

[strictnein]

The original founders sold the site for $1.8 Billion.

[shagie]

That was in 2021. https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosus-acquires-stack-...

Joel left in 2019 https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/1111267189133316097

Jeff left in 2012 https://blog.codinghorror.com/farewell-stack-exchange/

I'm not sure that it is fair to say that the original founders sold it for that amount.

[gurjeet]

It's possible that they had equity in the company after they left.

[shagie]

They probably had some nice checks written with their name in the "pay to the order of"... but they weren't the ones doing the selling, negotiating the price, or having any say in it more than any other shareholder (weighted by the shares and voting status) would.

To that end, with their various rounds of funding ( https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-overflow/compa... ), they likely had very little say in any of it after that series E ( https://stackoverflow.co/company/press/archive/series-e ) which is after Jeff and Joel had left and likely diluted any value they had substantially.

[blihp]

Because despite claims to the contrary most of these sites/projects aren't created for altruistic reasons, they were created to make money (at some point). Cashing out is typically part of the long term plan.

In the case of Stack Overflow, I think the reason for the data dumps was two-fold: one of the original founders (who left long ago) came across as at least idealistic and wanting to do the right thing. The other was pragmatic and most likely always thinking about the money angle. However, the other founder likely also saw the value of the data dumps from a PR standpoint which was quite valuable as they were initially trying to replace expertsexchange.com that paywalled most of the content. IIRC, they discussed the data dumps in the early days of their podcast.

Now that there's big money to be made from machine learning (both the models and the data they are trained on), they've likely decided 'screw it' on the PR value of the data dumps and would rather get some of that sweet, sweet machine learning money.

[actuallyalys]

The thing is, I sympathize with them not wanting machine learning companies to make money off the site’s content without any benefit to the contributors, moderators, or the site itself. I worry that gating access won’t really change that and just mean that the site owners also benefit at the expense of the community.

[lotsoweiners]

Wow I read the text for that link you posted in a very different way than I intended.

[jraph]

It is a well known situation. The best thing is that I don't think it was intentional, contrary to other well-known "offenders".

Experts Exchange was well known for showing up in search results but not providing the answers without paying. Many people hated it and wanted search engines to implement some sort of deny list to filter it out automatically.

[blihp]

Heh... yes, that was a popular joke at the time and one of many cautionary tales in picking a multi-word domain name.

[sgjohnson]

> I always wonder why original founders just sell the company and do something else.

They typically have millions of reasons. Sometimes billions.

[juujian]

So the idea is that in case leadership wants to 'carve out a kingdom' that is not in line with community wishes, the community could take the data dump and create a clone of sorts? Then now the last snapshot for doing so would be the last data drop from March?

[resolutebat]

Yes. There's moderately successful precedent: Wikivoyage is a fork of Wikitravel, which was went evil after it was sold to a content farm.

[wahnfrieden]

So it's time to community fork?

[b3morales]

Assuming that the linked post is accurate and that the "approval from senior leadership" to turn the dump back on does not come...then yes, I would say so. Actually there is already Codidact, although if I recall correctly they explicitly ruled out importing SE data when they started up. https://codidact.org

[Wowfunhappy]

Yeah, Codidact isn't a "fork" because they don't use the SE data.

[shagie]

It’s a fork of the community rather than the data and content.

[sitkack]

You really would need an existing dump to seed the new site.

[shagie]

There were a number of issues that lead to the decision not to do a grab and seed of SE into codidact.

There was the "what license is that post actually under? Is it 2.5? 3.0? 4.0?" which made things difficult.

There was the "what are the actual attribution requirements that SE has for sites that use its content?" This is a bit of an issue because it's never really clear what those requirements are and what you need to do. It can also hurt SEO because it's duplicated content. Furthermore, codidact leadership had already and enough dealings with SE lawyers and likely wanted to avoid any other.

Lastly, there was the desire to make a philosophical break with SE. The codidact founders didn't want to have anything to do with SE.

Some sites are doing ok. Others stood up but didn't have sufficient involvement to keep them going.

For a counter example, "PhysisOverflow" has an import tool that they use. https://www.physicsoverflow.org/4536/import-queue

Having an imported site that is mostly inactive with activity on that same content is even more disappointing than having a mostly empty site. And active mirroring is a time-consuming process that runs into rate limit issues with an API.