How can a user unhappy with the LLM partnerships protest constructively (and ideally- effectively)?

Question

I'm more asking this on behalf* of the many people I see trying to express protest to the OpenAI partnership in ways that get themselves into trouble:

• Deleting their own posts- individual or en masse
• Defacing/vandalizing their own posts- subtly or non-subtly

The result of doing those things is those users just get themselves into trouble because it's vandalism. See I've thought better of my question; can I delete it?.

Nor are those actions effective because

• by contributing, you agreed to the Terms of Service, which include giving SO Inc. a perpetual and irrevocable license to your content
• your content on Stack Exchange is CC-BY-SA licensed, which is an irrevocable license
• post deletion is soft- not hard (the post can be undeleted by anyone with the privileges to do so)
• the system is designed with rate limits and automatic-flags to prevent or slow down such deletions from people "rage-quitting"
• there are user-operated systems and tools to detect such vandalism

Aside: I won't make an ethical argument, but I will comment that I think it's sad that people resort to destructive actions on this resource (especially when they themselves care about it).

Lots of people are suggesting these ineffective and non-constructive methods of protest both in the OpenAI partnership announcement post, and off-site. In no coincidence, a lot of people are trying these things, and facing the consequences- especially on Stack Overflow right now (which has not gone unnoticed by the "outside world", and which I don't think is good PR for what is supposed to be protection of this community resource).

People can also delete their accounts, but that's pretty nuclear. You can't go back after that, and it seems like a lost opportunity to leave a message to future network users about why you did it. It doesn't cause your posts to get deleted- just semi-dissociated.

What can these people do to express their protest in a way that won't get them into trouble, and ideally is effective? (communicates clearly what they are unhappy about and has reach).

---

^{*I haven't found reason to protest at this moment because the announcement has no substance of detail about what the partnership actually means (what license is on the subscriber content given to the partners, what changes will be made to the SE platform, etc.), though I respect other peoples' choice of what they want to protest about.}

Answer 1

Anecdotally a lot of the folks involved seem to be folks with older accounts and somewhat underused. It also feels to a certain extent to be emotive. A lot of these folks haven't been active for years and seem baffled at moderation actions that have been done this way for years.

I've often found that people feel anger at the wrong people - sometimes lashing out at moderators or community members trying to maintain what are essentially long standing rules against self destruction of their posts, or even getting a badge, cause apparently they don't understand this is how we've always done things.

Rather than trying to burn down this place and the posts/content here, a productive way to redirect that anger might be to go back to the 'human' network. Work with sites that don't tie up with genAI companies. Work on your blog (and make sure you have the no AI robots.txt entries).

I'm personally convinced genAI is a grift, and that bubble will burst eventually. In the meanwhile I'd like folks to consider their actions and use that anger in a more productive way. Ragebuild, don't rageburn.

Deleting posts doesn't help cause they're probably already scraped/scrapable. Poisoning your code doesn't help cause outside the most trivial examples, genAI does a bad job at it anyway, hallucinating libraries and such. It might feel like you're doing something but I'm doubtful.

Answer 2

How can a user unhappy with the LLM partnerships protest constructively (and ideally- effectively)?

A constructive protest implies that there's at least one outcome that can be achieved which would appease the protester, and allow them to stop protesting. I think it's worth pointing out - some of the users who are defacing their own posts are not amenable to any sort of outcome. They've been wronged, and are fine burning the bridge behind them. For those users, the best we can offer is a "thanks for your time and good luck with your future endeavours".

Organise

For those frustrated with the current situation but open to real change, then the best course of action is to organise and collaborate with other people, on or off site. Figure out what goal you are trying to achieve, what's the ideal outcome and what are the alternative outcomes, and compromises the group is willing/not willing to accept.

Once you have that - a combined vision and game plan, the next step is to choose your actions: username/profile changes, open letters, meta discussion threads, strikes, or even simply leaving the site en-masse, are all options that - with a large enough base, can cause change to happen. This is ultimately how the mod and community strikes worked, and at a basic level, is how unions work.

Answer 3

Contribute to an alternative Q&A site or content fork

The main weapon for any open source project unhappy with its management is to fork the codebase. There are many examples of code projects doing this.

The equivalent for a content-based project like SE or Wikipedia is to take a snapshot of the content, host it elsewhere, and then build on it.

This achieves two objectives:

1. It moves (part of) the community away from SE.
2. It duplicates the content that SE currently holds, making it valueless for SE to sell to AI companies.

A successful fork leaves the original management with nothing but a snapshot of content that is also hosted elsewhere and a dwindling community.

Often, the threat of a fork is enough to keep the management listening to the community. It's likely that the threat of forks is what kept Wikipedia largely on the straight-and-narrow in the early days.

Where can we go?

There isn't any true fork of Stack Exchange currently running. You can try to organize and get this together, or just focus on aim 1 for now, and take your contributions elsewhere.

Codidact is one alternative project that has experimented with importing SE content. It currently doesn't aim to become a full fork, for various reasons, but perhaps with some extra community contributions, the idea could be investigated again.

Another alternative which aims for a less profit-driven managementis topanswers.xyz. It doesn't rehost SE content, but it still achieves aim 1.

Show people where you've gone

Once you've found an alternative community, you can use a simple addition to your username to signal that you've left and where you've gone. The Monica Cellio affair shows that if enough people do this, it generates quite a bit of attention for an issue.

Answer 4

Here are two simple ideas. The main issue with both is that they are not directly communicating to SE that you are unhappy about AI, but they both have the potential to actually affect the company.

#1: Install an adblocker, or if you already have one and whitelisted SE, remove it from the whitelist. Tell everyone you know who uses any SE sites to do the same.

This costs the company money, and thus at least has a measurable effect, even though it is small for an individual user. Simply expressing your dissatisfaction in writing (meta answers, your profile, etc.) doesn't have any effect in most cases, as was demonstrated lots of times during the controversies of the last years.

#2: Another potential option might be to submit requests that can only be handled by CMs or other company representatives and not by moderators - effectively creating extra work for the company. Note that I am not advocating spamming SE with illegitimate requests, but there are requests to which (at least some) users are legally entitled.

For example, EU citizens have the right to perform various data requests under the GDPR which must be answered in a timely manner, including requesting an export of your personal data in a machine-readable format (note the GDPR only covers your personal data and not your questions or answers). I'm not sure if some of those requests are handled by fully automatic processes, but if they require any form of work from a company employee, the company would definitely notice if they suddenly received lots of these requests, as ignoring them or taking too long is not an option for legal reasons.

And a bonus #3: Stop contributing, stop moderating, stop flagging, and stop doing any free work for this company. For example, don't help SE cleaning up after users who deface their posts, let the company do it by themselves (see also this answer by Shog9). This is significantly more effective if you're a moderator and go on strike, but if enough regular users stop doing any curation work this will eventually have an effect as well.

Answer 5

I don't think one can effectively protest much in the sense that it immediately and directly contributes to a different outcome. SO is a private company and has a lot of leeway to pursue partnerships. The history of the last years shows that the current company does not attribute much importance to the part of its user base that is active on Meta. Expressing an opinion additionally to the many negative scores will not make the message any clearer. It's already clear enough and the company cannot say it doesn't know what the community is thinking. In that way, registering more protest would only be an inefficient use of one's time.

Conclusion: I see nothing that can be done on this platform that effectively makes a difference. If you want to constructively protest, don't just go, run. Stop contributing here and, if you want, start to contribute elsewhere.

Answer 6

You can change your username to something that expresses your dissatisfaction. Of course, it needs to be something that is appropriate according to the Code of Conduct and other site rules (Ex. no expletives). This way, every post you've written will send some message of your choosing. This has been and still is a popular method of protest to unpopular company decisions.

You can also elaborate on the reason for your dissatisfaction in your user profile's "About Me" section.

Expressing yourself (respectfully) in an answer to related announcement posts on meta is also a good option. Don't forget to vote up other existing answer posts if you agree with them.

You can protest off-site too. There was a point where SO Inc. apparently seemed to listen to people on Twitter, but I don't know how true that is now.

^{Here I make my personal plea that whatever message you send, hopefully you convey that the concept of sites like the Stack Exchange network sites is still useful and worth pursuing (if you already/still believe that).}

Answer 7

I am not an active user on SE or SO, but I often participate by reading the Q&A, particularly in my fields of interest such as embedded & C, and it is something that really brings me joy the amount of knowledge I have learned so far with shared content.

After the moment that Partnership with OpenAI was announced, I noticed most of the users, the most active and high-reputation ones had stopped to answer or comment, leaving many unanswered questions.

Maybe it is a kind of protest or they just have abandoned SO for good, this is something I cannot answer. However, it's clear that current and future users are the ones losing out in this situation.

Something that I can imagine is the creation of an open-letter with the digital signature of the SE users to express their unhappiness with the current situation, explaining in detail why they are against this change and how the partneship with OpenAI might affect the SE, and sharing it on social media like Twitter "X" and LinkedIn to expose the current situation and how it will influence SO onwards.

^{Here I make my personal plea that whatever message you send, hopefully you convey that the concept of sites like the Stack Exchange network sites is still useful and worth pursuing (if you already/still believe that).}