
Firing mods and forced relicensing - tsegratis
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper
======
IronWolve
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.

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Rapzid
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..

~~~
throw_m239339
More a demonstration that there is no such thing as "political vacuum" or
"apolitical", eventually someone will manage to shove their own petty identity
politics in any community at its expense. And it is just the beginning.

I predict that in a few years, people who disagree with this or that thing
publicly on a unrelated social media platform and can be linked to their SO
profile will get kicked out of the website because they are deemed to create
an "unsafe and distressful environment for underprivileged groups".

------
javagram
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.

------
rubyn00bie
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.

------
IfOnlyYouKnew
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.

~~~
tsegratis
Fair points. I stand corrected on many of them

I posted it mainly because SO is copy-left, and not clear, but only really
compatible with gpl

That is a negative reason tho, and we can say that SO really has had massive
positive benefit -- and I should aim for something better

\-- But yeah, on the link topic...

We want to see people treated better. But part of that means accepting them
when they don't do or believe what I want -- and we can't force that onto them
-- or by extension onto SO or other companies either

So I guess I should do what you suggest, and aim for high standards, but build
up, rather than tear down

... Going forwards tho, it's going to be sadly hard to use SO for BSD or cc0
projects

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tsegratis
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/](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...](https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibility:_GPLv3)

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thirdtry
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...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/web-scraping-doesnt-
violate-anti-hacking-law-appeals-court-rules/)

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

~~~
toomuchtodo
[https://archive.org/download/stackexchange](https://archive.org/download/stackexchange)

Note that every item in the internet archive has a torrent file for
distribution purposes.

------
hayd
[https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/335509](https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/335509)

