The cynical view of America’s educational system—that it is merely a means by which privileged co-eds can make the right connections, build “social capital,” and get laid—is obviously on full display here.
Cynical? I call that realistic. That’s what privileged co-eds have been using it for the past 100 years.
I’m not following SO practices, but I it will come for it as well. It’s inevitable. Those who paid billions for it will require a ROI
Can you give an example of this enshittification for profit?
Yes, it’s what I was referring to in the second part.
“Free to use” on a VC-backed service just means you’re the product. I am accusing them of the same thing I’m accusing each VC-backed service: That they exploit our efforts to cash out and then sell the service for someone who will enshittify it for profit.
Also, what do you mean “easily downloadable”? Can anyone download the entire corpus of SO in a way that they could set up their own SO with the same content to bootstrap them?
The need for the service that SO provided won’t go away. Eventually people will migrate to new places to discuss. LLM creators will either constantly scrape those as well, forcing them to implement more and more countermeasures and GenAI-poison, or the services themselves will enshittify and sell our content (i.e. the commons) to LLM-creators.
Never again will I help provide content to a VC-backed service just so that they can rugpull us and cash-out.
Top: The Bard’s Song – In the Forest
Bottom: The Bard’s Song – The Hobbit