131–140 of 268 posts
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So it's time to community fork?
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
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> A non-profit site would be much better than a publicly owned one. Further, it could be operated by a co-op and democratically run, with its own “laws”. If it's better why isn't that how these sites are run? Wikipedia for example is an anomaly.
They're hard to capitalize. You need a skilled founder willing to forego profits, or a group of well intentioned devs with management experience, to organize the business side of things. You have to figure out non investment sources of income (charge for services, donations, etc. maybe no ads or at least no ad networks if you're worried about privacy or ethics). It's a lot of work, especially trying to scale that up…
Also I think people underestimate how much effort goes in to moderating Stack Overflow, and how delicate the entire system is. There's already a whole bunch of Open Source Q&A software out there and I'm sure one of them will work fine, that's not really the hard part, and managing servers is also "just" a matter of spending time. Moderating and managing it all is much harder and more time-consuming; there are people whose ability to hold down a job or finish their homework quite literally depends on being to ask questions on Stack Overflow: there's a lot of incentive to abuse the crap out of it, more so than many other sites.
This, along with recent Reddit goings-on has made me realize a major risk with the current structure of online communication. Take either Reddit or Stack Exchange as examples. They build a platform, and users contribute their time, thought, energy, and knowledge to build a community on that platform. Those companies can then gatekeep and restrict access to all that the community built, when all they did is provide th…
The idea that these networks and communities need to run on centralised servers is archaic. The technology exists where people should be able to own their own network (followers, subs, following, posts).
This, along with recent Reddit goings-on has made me realize a major risk with the current structure of online communication. Take either Reddit or Stack Exchange as examples. They build a platform, and users contribute their time, thought, energy, and knowledge to build a community on that platform. Those companies can then gatekeep and restrict access to all that the community built, when all they did is provide th…
You're onto something. Team-BHP [1] is run exactly like this, and it seems to be working.
For those wondering, it's a car-enthusiasts website based in India. They've been around for around 18 odd years I think.
The moderators all have actual dayjobs.
When signing up you have to write a paragraph about why you're really a petrolhead (or dieselhead because Indians love European turbo-diesels :) ), and there's a human on the other end vetting your sign-up application! Plenty, including me, have been rejected atleast once. I got in on my 2nd attempt years later.
As a matter of principle they refuse to do car advertisements.
I don't know how well the site is engineered but it works. Check it out. But I suspect most non-Indians (such as most people on HN) wouldn't find it that useful as it's mostly about the Indian car scene.
This, along with recent Reddit goings-on has made me realize a major risk with the current structure of online communication. Take either Reddit or Stack Exchange as examples. They build a platform, and users contribute their time, thought, energy, and knowledge to build a community on that platform. Those companies can then gatekeep and restrict access to all that the community built, when all they did is provide th…
You're seriously underestimating the effort it took to build that platform and how much effort it continues to take to keep it running well. I'm not talking about technical challenges, but social ones. It took a long time for them to get the system and incentives right (and it's still not quite right, IMHO), and it takes continued effort to keep it running well in the form of moderation and stopping abuse (and here it also doesn't quite get things right).
I could bang out a "BufferUnderrun.com" in a few months; many people could. But that's not the hard part.
As a reminder, all the SE sites have content under a Creative Commons, By Attribution, Share Alike license, allowing for, among other things, commercial re-use [0] [1]. Yes, it sucks that the SE sites are getting more draconian about allowing access to their content but the SE sites are well insulated against it completely disappearing precisely because they're under a libre/free license. Note that Reddit [2], nor HN…
The change to 4.0 was done without permission according to many in the comunity. "Stack Exchange doesn't have the right to unilaterally change the license of previously submitted content." - https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/344491/an-update-on...
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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 abil…
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
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.
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SO delivered some value, the users are the ones who delivered huge, huge amounts of value
Right, which SO (and not some other site) managed to entice. Somehow users didn’t flock to my ethansusefulprogrammerquestionandanswers.com ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
the primary value on SO is generated by the users, and thus the value proposition to enticing new users is also generated by the users. SO is just a forum.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 abil…
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
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.