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.
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]
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/393046/who-or-what-...
To me, this was the canary. Just another psychopath megacorp.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They typically have millions of reasons. Sometimes billions.
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.
https://software.codidact.com/categories/38
I haven't used codidact (sorry, name needs replacing), ok just poked around
* too slow
* needs type ahead find search
* needs a GIST experience
* "Tipping" or actually giving money to a question answerer would be cool
* Having a question asker being able to put a bounty on question would be cool
I really hoped that they would have gone for something much more radical in terms of trying to create a way to share knowledge.
It's Stack(Exchange|Overflow) with better governance and a different development cycle time and focus - and I appreciate that... but its still that same Stack in terms of underlying format.
I would have been more interested if they went to something like how Discourse is different from forums. It's still a forum, but it took the structure of a forum in a new way that solves some of the traditional forum issues.
I'd also suggest checking out https://topanswers.xyz ( https://topanswers.xyz/tex is one of the more active ones). For example https://topanswers.xyz/tex?q=4593 - and you'll note that there's a chat rather than comments on a question or an answer...
But getting that community there, and stable, and growing is a very hard problem. It's one of the things that Reddit and SO are fairly successful at doing because of the network effects and the corresponding exoduses from other services when they were growing.
There was a compelling story to tell of "why do you ant to switch." There's a story now, but mastodon, Lemmy, codidact and similar haven't really stood out. It feels like "we're the same but better... if you ignore the performance of the site."
"Yea, I could switch from reading reddit to reading Lemmy... but it doesn't have a feed of 200 cat pictures I need each day for my daily dose of eye bleach."
The shtshow is the reason to switch, but there also needs to be new capabilities on the other side. As soon as they break old.reddit.com, I am out.
I feel like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub is 10x more complex than it needs to be. The SO replacement should be an application on-top of an existing protocol.
On the technical level, while Q&A is central, we also have other post types and other models. That post I linked to is an article in a blog that's part of our Meta community. The Electrical Engineering community has papers, so people can present information outside of the Q&A structure. Code Golf has a sandbox where people can get feedback on draft challenges before posting them. Software Development has a Code Review category. Some of our communities have added their own customizations to the code, like Code Golf's leaderboard for challenge answers. We want to work together with our communities to build what best serves their needs.
We've done some things that look small but might have larger effects. For example, the asker of a question can't mark one answer as "accepted" like on SO, but anybody can mark an answer as "works for me" -- or "outdated", or other annotations that communities can define. Scoring takes controversy into account, because +10/-5 and +5/-0 are very different even if they're both "net 5". With threaded comments, it doesn't matter so much if two people have an extended conversation; it's not in the way. Abilities are granted based on activity and reputation is just a number -- or can be turned off entirely if that's what a community wants. We're trying to make as much stuff configurable as we can, because we can't possibly know what's going to be best for every single community and don't have the hubris to claim we do.
We have the usual bootstrapping problem of a new thing. Our communities are small and trying to grow. Because they're small, visitors don't see thousands of questions and high activity, so they don't participate either and wander away, making it harder to build activity. We would love to find people who want to work with us to build communities. We recognize that helping to build a community with us is going to be harder and slower than just asking your question on SO, but if everyone were happy with SO this thread wouldn't be here, so maybe we're an option to a few people reading this?
(I haven't posted much on Hacker News, so I hope I've read the room correctly and that this kind of comment is ok. If not, I apologize and would appreciate correction so I don't repeat mistakes. Thank you.)