Game programmer, designer, director; retired quadball player; antimeme; radical descriptivist; antilabel; Moose;

Working at Muse Games. Directed Embr, worked on Wildmender and Guns of Icarus, Making new secret stuffs

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cohostunionnews
@cohostunionnews

I also can't really speak to this having no experience with Stack Overflow, but it is my understanding that some or all of their moderators are on strike indefinitely, owing to a "near-total prohibition on moderating AI-generated content" that came from the top. This seems pretty significant (especially in terms of digital union-like actions, which are pretty rare), so I'll also post it today. An open letter on this can be found below:


We, the undersigned, are volunteer moderators, contributors, and users of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network. Effective immediately, we are enacting a general moderation strike on Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network, in protest of this and other recent and upcoming changes to policy and the platform that are being forced upon us by Stack Overflow, Inc.

Our efforts to effect change through proper channels have been ignored, and our concerns disregarded at every turn. Now, as a last resort, we are striking out of dedication to the platform that we have put over a decade of care and volunteer effort into. We deeply believe in the core mission of the Stack Exchange network: to provide a repository of high-quality information in the form of questions and answers, and the recent actions taken by Stack Overflow, Inc. are directly harmful to that goal.

Specifically, moderators are no longer allowed to remove AI-generated answers on the basis of being AI-generated, outside of exceedingly narrow circumstances. This results in effectively permitting nearly all AI-generated answers to be freely posted, regardless of established community consensus on such content.

In turn, this allows incorrect information (colloquially referred to as "hallucinations") and plagiarism to proliferate unchecked on the platform. This destroys trust in the platform, as Stack Overflow, Inc. has previously noted.

In addition, the details of the policies issued directly to moderators differ substantially from the guidelines outlined publicly, with moderators barred from publicly sharing the details.

These policies disregard the leeway historically granted to individual Stack Exchange communities to determine their policies, by making changes without the input of the community, overriding community consensus, and outright refusing to reconsider their position.

Until this matter is resolved satisfactorily, we will be pausing activities including, but not limited to:

  • Raising and handling flags.
  • Running SmokeDetector, the anti-spam bot.
  • Closing or voting to close posts.
  • Deleting or voting to delete posts.
  • Reviewing tasks in the various review queues.
  • Running various other bots designed to assist in moderation, such as detecting plagiarism, low-quality answers, and rude comments.

Until Stack Overflow, Inc. retracts this policy change to a degree that addresses the concerns of the moderators, and allows moderators to effectively enforce established policies against AI-generated answers, we are calling for a general moderation strike, as a last-resort effort to protect the Stack Exchange platform and users from a total loss in value. We would also like to remind Stack Overflow, Inc. that a network that entirely relies on volunteers for its moderation model cannot then consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign those same volunteers.


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in reply to @cohostunionnews's post:

Stack overflow had taken the stance to ban all AI-generated content. It didn't matter it was spam or the perfect answer, if it was AI-generated, that was enough for removal.

I guess the company is owned by someone with significant stake in AI and didn't want the example of a big community banning AI, just like most company would prefer to kill their business than allow an union.

the letter states it pretty clearly

because StackOverflow incentivizes people to answer questions and rewards them with points for doing so, there was an epidemic of people trying to farm points by copy-pasting questions into AI services like ChatGPT and pasting the answers back into StackOverflow

It's a cheap and easy way to produce answers that look good at a glance and aren't obviously spam, so people are doing it in massive amounts. Even though the answers are often flawed on closer examination, the flaws are hidden well enough that it takes actual human effort to check them.

A lot of user-generated content sites are getting hit by this right now. The combination of "massive increase in submission rates" and "much of the content has major flaws that require real scrutiny to discover" is completely overwhelming sites that prioritize content quality over quantity. It's a huge increase in workload, since there's a lot more content that needs screening, and the screening can't be deferred because a higher-than-usual portion of the content is utter crap that can't be allowed to stay up for too long. That's especially bad for sites like StackOverflow who depend on unpaid human volunteers contributing their time and expertise to help screen answers.