As leaders and moderators of the OpenAI Developer Community Forum, we stand in solidarity with the Stack Overflow community’s right to protest. We call on OpenAI to clearly explain how contributions from Stack Overflow users are attributed and utilized in AI development.
We (leaders and moderators) emphasize that we are volunteers, not OpenAI employees, and independently support our communities. We oppose unfairly banning longstanding contributors and invite Stack Overflow and OpenAI community members to share their thoughts here and make your voices heard, but let’s keep the discussion constructive and respectful.
Communities should recognize the value of their contributions and promote decentralized platforms like Mastodon. Relying on centralized solutions only ensures that users are exploited and never fairly compensated.
By controlling both the content and infrastructure, communities can also control the revenue. Platforms like Reddit and Stack Overflow, which depend heavily on community engagement and unpaid moderation, are a relic of time. I really think it’s time for people to move on.
Imagine being rewarded for discussing your favorite topics online—the way it should be. Being paid for every drawing, audio clip, video, poem, program, that you create as hundreds, thousands, WHO KNOWS… of models use it for training.
Instead, the revenue continues to be funneled to profit-driven corporations that degrade their services in the relentless search for growing profits.
I get that, but I still think there’s a place for corporate-sponsored communities which depend heavily on community engagement and unpaid moderation, but they need to treat contributors with respect.
Agreed. This community forum is a shining example.
To me it’s just crazy that we depend on these massive corporations to host all the content (like Reddit & Twitter… Basically all of Social Media) when we all have sufficient computer hardware, bandwidth, and resources to manage it on our own.
But, I’m looking into the future when each property becomes alive with built-in hardware and AI capabilities . I mean shiiiettt, why not spending a small amount of compute and bandwidth on hosting personal content
AI will erase humanity. This cat’s already out of the bag. Been for a while.
Software folks didnt know they’d be among the first on the chopping block.
Short of global solidarity in government intervention, there’s not much anyone can do.
And considering the haughty attitude the Stack Overflow community has exuded for quite a while, it’s hard to muster empathy for them specifically.
Divide and conquer.
First, they came for the journalists. I did not care, for I was not one of them.
Then, they came for the artists. I did not care, for I was not one of them.
Then they came for the engineers I didn’t like…
Yeah. The goal of this community has always been to provide a space where developers who are making stuff using the OpenAI API can help each other solve various issues related to that, and OpenAI has for the most part been really good at providing us with the resources to do that.
We do, but from my perspective, this is not the issue. The real issue is that, as the community grows, it will require more and more time to manage, and relying only on volunteers, donations, and goodwill quickly becomes unsustainable.
I think the only people on the chopping block will be the folks who refuse to get along with the times, but that’s how it’s always been. Do you know any developer who refused to use the internet?
Similar to how moderators are posted to sub-communities of Reddit they would instead be a part of their encapsulated, independent network where the community creates content of some sort and the revenue from training models is passed down to the members and moderators.
As long as the content is good, the scaling should match the potential value of the community.
This is compared to the current solution, which is to have a single massive entity that demands immense resources and eventually builds itself towards the inevitable slide of Enshittification.
Instead of fostering healthy environments and discovering ways to provide value back to the user, these services are tightening their services, becoming more aggressive with licensing, and demonstrating that whatever you post is not yours.
If a moderator invests 1 hour a day that’s 365 hours a year of free labor. Even at $20/hr that’s $7,300. I bet some moderators spend even more time than that. Then, once anything goes slightly off the projected course. Boom, moderators removed.
The internet use to be free, but the reality is that everything posted will be automatically classified, and valued. Are people going to post free content, knowing that it will be consumed by models and regurgitated a couple days later?
Not only that, but anything I post I know for sure will be immortalized. If my name was to be found in other websites, social media platforms I could EASILY build a complete character profile of myself and learn SO MUCH. So, great. My posts are being harvested for profit by both the owner, the model creators, AND advertising, and I get NOTHING.
I am selling my personality, my interests, and my content, FOR FREE. I bet you companies will have “person finder” AI programs that scour the internet and models instantly to find everything and anything I have ever posted. Sure, maybe this has always been possible before, but it’s now INSANELY easy when you have a LLM that can gather a book full of semantics in mere minutes.
Yeah, I have always worked under the notion that everything I post online on any forum can be freely used by anyone, that is what the “free internet” means to me. As long as it helps somebody out there, I’m happy.
However, I also think moves like these take us further and further away from real human interactions that actually create value. How is anyone supposed to tell me that I made an error in my code if all they get is an LLM regurgitation of my work without attribution?
Me too. That’s why I join these communities. The human element is what makes it special.
Yet now, especially with OpenAI attempting to stand up against Google it really just feels like a matter of time until these communities follow a “Dark Forest” pattern, where nothing is left in the open to prevent the inevitable information-hungry vultures crowding over their content, consuming eachother when possible, salivating at the chance of some free meal. The surface of the internet will be scorched.
First, it is available only to “select, high-quality editorial partners,” and its purpose is to help ChatGPT users more easily discover and engage with publishers’ brands and content.
Additionally, members of the program receive priority placement and “richer brand expression” in chat conversations, and their content benefits from more prominent link treatments.
To me, this deck simply says: “Fall in line, or fall”. To be fair it’s a “leak”, which could be fake, but the fact that there hasn’t been any refuting voice kind of suggests something to me.
Don’t think we’ll go full “dark forest” though. I have seen a few communities try that, only to suffer an agonizing death as users slowly leave the platform without new people coming in. I don’t want big companies pushing that development even further, and don’t get me wrong, I do like the “move fast and break things”, but I don’t want to see this extended to people and communities.
Invite-only (Although the invite is usually public, most communities have some anti-bot attempts)
Decaying messages that are not public to anyone except (sometimes only contributing) members.
Even with their current standards some people are breaking through and scraping content for resale:
But one surveillance tool, is tracking Discord users across the servers they’ve joined and provides detailed logs of all messages sent on servers for a starting price of about $5 worth of crypto.
Side note: The scraping website is back up and is boasting
I’ve spent a long time on discord, both as a user, moderator and server owner.
Imo it’s a completely dysfunctional platform, I’ve seen entire communities obliterated by discord overnight. Running a successful discord is a lot of work, and it usually requires someone at the top to be available 24/7 without compensation, because every cent donated to the server through “nitro” and “server boost’s” goes directly into the pockets of discord.
As a server owner, I ended up spending countless hours tending to the community and the people within it, at the cost of my own time and resources, and at some point it stops being reasonable and responsible to do so. Sure you can bring in more people to help, but in the end you’re just extending the problem into the future where it will affect even more people.
And don’t get me wrong, discord is a great platform if you have 10 gamer friends you’d like to keep in contact with, but it’s completely unsustainable for large communities.
Completely agree. It’s just another sad centralized resource that ironically justifies it’s redundant existence by the same means that it justifies taking money from supporters.
We need to return back to IRC. They’re so dang easy to host, and imagine if moderators could pool their resources with the server owner for help. E2E encryption so only the participants have a copy of the chatlogs.
LOL. It makes sense that these privacy focused, open solutions are eventually overcome with illegal purposes.
That’s not to say that all of these things don’t happen on all platforms though. It’s just that typical users prefer easier solutions without the overhead of setting up.
Usually there’s a balance between privacy & security, and accessibility.
If it’s just as easy, as user friendly, as accessible then it would be huge, and we’re definitely getting there. WhatsApp is E2E encrypted.
Mastodon (although not encrypted) & Lenny are shining examples to this future imo.
I’d also like to think that IRC would become a standard for communicating with home-AI networks
. I mean shiiiettt, why not spending a small amount of compute and bandwidth on hosting personal content
