Firing mods and forced relicensing

I have an old coworker who works at Github now. He was on a date with a co-worker from another group (and another state) at a town hall. He at a bar after work, and 2 women who worked at github seen them flirt with each other, and reported him to HR.

HR made him sign a form that he wouldn't date co-workers, even if in another group. (Him only)

There was no rule against dating, but that didnt stop HR from getting into his life. If things are this bad at HR, I cant imagine the rules all over the place.

Yet another company and community trainwreck caused by toxic individuals pushing agenda at the expense of everything else. Companies haven't yet learned to nip this in the bud, but they have learned to move on(GitHub). I expect some people will be leaving SE before long here..

The title is confusing, can it be changed?

There is no “forced GPL”, they are still using a Creative Commons license although there are legal problems with their attempt to retroactively relicense some of it from 3.0 to 4.0.

I like the idea of StackOverflow, hell I even like trying to answer a question from time-to-time... but I really hate StackOverflow.

There's this sort of like weird hierarchy on the site of people who essentially are there, to climb over others, socialize, and enforce their metaphorical "wet-dreams" of fatous pedantry to its absolute maximum.

1.) Lately, as I've been re-upping my frontend skills, I see questions from n00bs are totally shit on by moderators pointing to answers which are totally overkill, or nearly-incomprehensible for them sweet lil' baby n00bs...

2.) Related to #1, linked-to answers are often times incomplete or wrong because of outdated information, but newer versions are marked dupes... I can't imagine how many people new to JavaScript, probably spend the first year reading shit that literally doesn't work or hasn't been needed since 2011 because of an answer on StackOverflow.

3.) Edits for quite literally no reason. People will change the language of things to sometimes be flat-out incorrect ~5-10% of the time, and the other ~90% its purely cosmetic illustrating only the moderator's aforementioned lust for pedantry.

4.) Comments and suggestions which are clearly outside of scope. Personal example from this weekend.

I posted an answer to someone who I could tell was quite new due to their very strange looking HTML (which works, but wasn't semantically correct) and JS asking about how to bind an event to an element (a span). I replied with with how to bind their event, and had quite consciously decided against mentioning their usage of HTML could be better because I don't want to overwhelm them. I've taught folks before and too much information isn't useful..

What happens next is all to regular, I get a comment to my answer saying my answer is simply wrong; _because_, I didn't address the author's "mis-use" of HTML even though I actually answered their fucking question.

To me, it feels like StackWhatever, has a fucking giant culture problem somewhere and it's not being addressed or fixed on any level. There's no way this isn't a problem from the top-down... to be honest, I honest think their gamification may be part of the problem as it leads social-strata being created by the community, in a way that can only exclude instead of include.

I have no beef in this fight. But seeing how the author exaggerates (to a point some would term lying) the license update makes me suspicious.

It seems any company or platform at some point sees an inflection of the public opinion, followed by an endless series of negative articles making the front pages on social media.

That could be consistent with good companies suddenly turning bad. But I suspect it's just as consistent with peoples' tendency to enjoy drama, tearing down the previous generation's idols, and being adored for speaking in one voice with the hive.

FWIW I have seen no change in SO's usefulness over the years. I also still remember everything that came before, even though I would like to forget. And I'll continue to post answers when the opportunity presents itself.

Linking this partly because I just realized every snippet on stackoverflow is effectively gpl

It requires hyperlinking each of stackoverflow, the question page, the authors, AND those links are not to be nofollow

https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/25/attribution-required/

Also: ""Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 4.0 with attribution required.""

cc by-sa 4.0 is viral/copyleft, and gpl compatible, see:

https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibili...

I have used stack exchange properties as read-only for several years now. I would continue to contribute so I can payback the help I have received, but it is not a friendly place.

Is there a solution to this?

Someone will reinvent a new service, so a new community will form, and then most important data will be recreated?

Can I use the latest court ruling

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/web-scraping-doe...

to repurpose stack exchange data? Or just to keep a stash of data for myself?