In my other answer, I mostly focus on licensing and why there are materially problematic issues with the current plan. In this answer, my focus is on why the announcement is problematic from a moral standpoint.

The story of how LLMs changed the Company

Github Co-Pilot, the start of the LLM revolution

When GitHub Co-Pilot came out in 2021, a lot of developers saw it as transformative. A portion of software developers no longer needed to Bingoogle their questions, because they had a Co-Pilot that could direct them without leaving the IDE. Stack Overflow, however, maintained their course--focused on Stack Overflow for Teams to monetize the product. The Company did not pivot to begin working on any sort of VS Code extension, or other LLM/AI-powered features.

ChatGPT, the commoditization of LLMs

When ChatGPT landed in November 2022, however, the Company noticed. And the Company realized that they were being left behind. This has lead to a frantic attempt to catch up, but also attempts at kneecapping the competition. Notably, I believe the only AI-powered or LLM-powered products delivered to date are limited to Stack Overflow for Teams, and are not publicly available for individual use.

On March 28, 2023, the Data Dump was disabled at the direction of the Prashanth Chandrasekar, the Stack Overflow CEO. At the time, I was on the DBRE team at Stack Overflow, and I was the person who the CEO directed to disable the upload to Archive.org. That conversation ended as thus. This is a direct transcript of our conversation--I've removed a single back/forth for brevity, represented as ...:

PC: If we disable, how long does it take to re-establish the link if we want to open it back up?

Me: Disabling/re-enabling is just a simple switch. It's a scheduled job that runs once per quarter--so er can just turn it back on and/or kick it off ad-hoc anytime we want.

But if we don't upload on schedule, we're likely to have someone notice and ask about it on Meta. So we would need to be prepared to respond--or better proactively explain it on a Meta post of our own.

The Community Team probably just needs to be in the loop to not be caught off guard with the customer service side of it.

...

PC: And remind me, we know who is accessing the data in Archive.org?

Me: We don't really know. The internet archive doesn't require users to be logged in to download it.

PC: OK, then lets auto disable it for now so we don't forget and we can come up with a plan with the community team in the coming weeks.

Just over a month later, on May 10, 58 employees, including me, were laid off. I was no longer able to influence community notification.

Broken Promises

Data Dump Disaster (Data Dumpster Fire?)

A month after that, the Community was surprised when the Data Dump wasn't published per usual, despite the assurances made to me that the CM team be brought in. I take issue with the subsequent statements by Stack Overflow CTO and by Philippe that it was always going to be re-enabled, but I was satisfied with the outcome (the Data Dump was brought back).

In Philippe's announcement, he made two promises:

We will continue to work toward the creation of certain guardrails (for large AI/LLM companies) for both the dumps and the API, but again - we have no intention of restricting/charging community members or other responsible users of the dumps or the API from accessing them.

As part of this project, API users should be on the lookout for a very brief survey that will be coming out (it will be announced here and on stackapps.com) that asks about the features that you most use/would like to see in the API or data dumps moving forward so that we can plan for those, as well as collect general input.

Survey? What survey?

The company did send a survey about the API, without mention of the Data Dump. Speaking for myself--a consumer of the Data Dump, but not of the API--I didn't respond to the survey, and could only hope that another survey would be sent for the Data Dump. It wasn't. As such, the Community was never solicited for feedback on how we use the Data Dump--we've not had our chance to share our user stories that would drive changes to the Data Dump.

I can only assume that the reason Community Users were never surveyed about our Data Dump usage is because the company doesn't care how we use it. Their intent has been clear for the last year--they couldn't eliminate the Data Dump completely as they originally hoped, so they will restrict it as much as they can get away with. The direction to do so comes from the CEO.

Maybe someone just conflated the API and the Data Dump? Seems unlikely that anyone familiar with the two products would conflate the two of them given how dramatically different they are. I've noticed that the API often gets name-dropped when the Data Dump is being discussed, and vice versa. However, they serve very different purposes--one is great for "point lookups" on individual posts, while the Data Dump is best for set-based queries and analysis.

Fast Forward to today...

Senior Leadership has been thinking about this since at least March 2023. In June 2023, Philippe explicitly promised that they were working on "guardrails" for the data dump. More than a year later, that work hasn't been completed--the feature was only sent to engineering teams last week.

Despite the Company "working on" a new data dump process for over a year, it still isn't ready. Additionally, the assurance that the old process would stay in place until the new one is ready has gone out the window.

• By turning off the old process before the new process is ready, the company has broken a promise made just last year.
• By moving the data dump off of the Internet Archive, and onto Stack Overflow hosted infrastructure, the company has broken a promise made by the Company's Founders to archive the data with a 3rd party to ensure access to the data stays open.
• By surveying only API use, and not Data Dump use, the company has broken another promise made just last year to "[ask] about the features that you most use/would like to see in the API or data dumps moving forward"--while this was done for the API, it wasn't done for the Data Dump.
• By attempting to place additional restrictions (ex, non-commercial use), the company is violating their own Terms of Service which require the Data Dump to be licensed under the CC BY-SA license.
• By failing to use Community feedback in creating this data dump plan over the course of the last year, the Company has alienated the content creators who contribute the data that makes Stack Overflow unique.

My proposal for moving forward.

Keeping in mind the company's core values...

The Company has fallen woefully short on the values of "Be transparent" and "Keep community at our center." I would propose that the company take the following steps, which would be more in line with the Company's core values:

• Recognize that the Data Dump is a product intended to support open data, and the rights of the content creators who maintain ownership & copyright, while also licensing creations liberally and openly.
• Embrace a problem-oriented solution, where features and decisions can be mapped to a user story.
• Re-enable the existing Data Dump upload to the Internet Archive until such time that a suitable replacement is complete and ready. Ideally, the two methods would overlap for one quarter to allow a transition period.
• Survey the users of the product (Community users, researchers, etc who use the Data Dump) for how we use the current Data Dump, and what current or future "features" are important to users.
• Share with the community any requirements that the Company has, in addition to the end user requirements.
• Improve transparency around licensing, and how licensing has impacted decision making. (Responses to this question show many contributors are deeply committed to open data, and permissive licensing of their content.)

Harsh reality

Every Question & Answer on Stack Overflow is licensed under the CC BY-SA license, which allows commercial use, and already requires both attribution and "share-alike" to maintain the openness of the data. The company seems focused on restricting commercial use, which is not only futile and ultimately an impossible game of whack-a-mole--but also a violation of license terms. The company's only rational, legal basis to prevent abuse of the data is to pursue use that violates the BY-SA license.

A Data Dump will end up on the Internet Archive, even if the Company doesn't post it.

The Company will get sued if they attempt to prevent commercial use of data that is explicitly licensed for commercial use. And the Company will lose such a lawsuit.

The Company has further hurt their relationship with content creators by continuing to repeat the same mistakes year-after-year.

Assuming that the most valuable contributions come from high-reputation users, those folks have already stopped posting on the site.