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Comment by zdimension | Hacker News Reader

Title is a little misleading. Regardless of one's opinion on StackOverflow's partnership with OpenAI, editing existing questions & answers to replace them with protest messages fully fits their rules' definition of defacing.

Editing the answers through SO's tools is not the right way to protest (since it's trivial for them to suspend you because you're clearly violating their rules); the GDPR is. Making a GDPR deletion request is quite easy.

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Stackoverflow answers are under CC BY-SA license: "The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms." https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Maybe not legally speaking, but the users are the ones who put the time into the answers. To the users, emotionally, it's their own content they are "defacing", and they're doing it specifically because the content they worked hard on is now being greedily monetized in the 'AI rush'.

Protest is rarely pretty, often not legal. That's the point...

Unfortunately in this case it's going to be pretty useless. It's not hard for Esso to detect changes that decrease the utility of an answer and replace it with the one from their archive.

It's still a good protest if you're not covered by GDPR. As long as you don't care about the account that is - I suspect you're going to be banned after a few times. But there's only so many people able to review changes/flags. Enough people could totally DoS the review system and force some changes.

Its very easy.

No one is editing their posts constantly and with high change.

Take your backups (you have anyway), diff the content, allow only minor changes and a max edit limit of x, restore the content if those criteria are not met.

Sure it costs a week or a month to add this feature to the platform but data will not be lost.

Nonetheless, SO is not the only ones having an archive of SO

It's not that easy. Major changes / rewrites for quality are not that rare. Minor changes could also break the system by injecting false information. And even if you could automate this, it still takes time / effort continuously, because people who really care will adapt.

Any protest like that will affect SO's ability to do other things they care about.

I've understood that companies are allowed to retain data that they need for legal reasons even if you do a GDPR delete request – and by posting on Stack Overflow you've granted them a perpetual, unrevokable license to your posts under the condition that they attribute the work to you. Sounds legally complicated to say the least.

I don’t think questions and answers that were willingly published count as GDPR data. SO probably retains rights to them.

And not even just SO. They were licensed to you, me and everyone else under Creative Commons, the OP can't just revoke the license.

User content is explicitly licensed under CC-BY-SA. Claiming GDPR on it is just as silly as claiming GDPR because someone forked your GPL project in a way you didn't like.

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