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Comment by sethhochberg | Hacker News Reader

> Stack Overflow has been banning users wholesale who have attempted to delete or deface their own posts on the site

Its not just people who are upset getting banned for being upset, its people who are attempting to burn it all down on their way out the door in protest.

I get where the protests are coming from, but the cardinal rule of online communities is "once you post it, its out there". Other people have reacted to it, replied to it, quoted it. You break not just your own content but entire discussions if you mass-delete your contributions. They stopped being exclusively yours to take back once you contributed them to a broader conversation.

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> but the cardinal rule of online communities is "once you post it, its out there"

That's you opinion, not a cardinal rule. For example, Reddit comments and posts are deleted by users all the time.Same for Twitter, where users delete their posts and reacts all the time.

SO is different. It's a community effort, an asker and a set of answerers create something together, and SO+moderators clean up so that something is easy to find by searching (and also make the total collection downloadable).

This asker ignored the rights of the answerers, moderators and SO, all of which put effort into creating that. I won't mind if someoen deletes his own unanswered question, but vandalising it after answerers put in an effort to answer? That's rude and egoistic.

Unlike on other sites, I don't participate here beyond anonymous throwaway comments because there's no freedom to delete my content. If sites don't allow that freedom, it changes how or if people will participate.

If there is a delete button, it's fair game to use.

There is a delete button for unanswered questions. As soon as someone else has put in effort and, the combined result is no longer yours to delete.

I've never participated on SO, I don't know if you're saying that the site doesn't let you delete in that scenario, or if it's bad etiquette to delete. If the latter, I'd disagree and say it's my choice alone (unless the site reneges on the ability to delete.)

The site doesn't let you.

I want to post a separate response to this.

Yes, the lack of that changes how people participag on SO. I think it's a considerable reason why SO is the large resource that it is, with as many answers as it has. If askers could delete their questions (and thereby had the ability to make my answers un-google-able), I'm not sure I'd bother to answer, for example. Would you?

> SO is different. It's a community effort…

More to your point, it’s focused on evergreen information. Ideally the questions and answers get refined over time to resolve in to accurate documents that the public can use to solve problems. Most social media is about attention/dissemination in the moment and puts the individual above all.

Its a practical reality of the internet. It would be simply naive to believe that all content on Stack Overflow, Hacker News, and wherever else any of us post has not been scraped and archived by dozens of parties who I never explicitly authorized to archive my words.

When I say "rule", I'm speaking in terms of "how each person posting content should operate". Once you make your words public, you (should) have no expectation of being able to take them back.

It's true that I can't undo Reddit having sold my content for models, I don't lose sleep about what I can't change. But we have every expectation (on every site but this one) that we can delete our content to empty out the original context.

SO lets your delete your unanswered questions, and also your unaccepted answers.

It doesn't let you delete your question after someone has gone to the trouble of answering though. Good thing IMO.

I don’t know if it’s still the case, but for many years deleting something simply hid it and there were browser extensions to “undelete” comments.

Aren't they just deleted on the front end though?

I thought reddit keeps them still in the backend.

> You break not just your own content but entire discussions if you mass-delete your contributions.

If they allow users to delete or edit their own content, then what's the issue? That just sounds like a technical problem StackExchange didn't think of.

On the other hand, why is this behaviour deemed unacceptable, and StackExchange double dipping on user generated content is not?

> On the other hand, why is this behaviour deemed unacceptable, and StackExchange double dipping on user generated content is not?

At least I'm engaging on StackExchange with the understanding that conversations (questions, answers, comments) there go on the public record for the benefit of future curious humans. I see that as a way of giving back to a community that's provided me with invaluable knowledge.

If I'd known somebody might delete their half of a fruitful conversation as a political statement months or years down the road, I might never have spent the time and effort of participating.

Thinking of it in terms of co-authorship, one of several co-authors also doesn't get to retroactively destroy the combined work by ripping out their individual contributions. If you collaborate, make sure you know and are aligned with the terms of the resulting work.

They've definitely thought about it. This is not the first user to rage quit and vandalize their posts and they have standard procedures to deal with it. (IIRC their system will even automatically flag bulk edits for review.) If you would like to disavow your content, you can ask to have your name removed, but once the content is out there and considered sufficiently valuable, it will not be deleted.

I don't agree with how StackOverflow's current management has been running the site, but for anyone who has used the site, the outcome of this behavior should have been obvious. I'm sure Wikipedia would react the same if you deface all the pages you contributed to prevent OpenAI from consuming words you wrote.

"Once you post it its out there" sure... but if you piss off huge portions of the platform, then they have just as much right to now become your enemy and flood your system with worse trash than the AI is capable of.

Great, so how did these companies expect to stab so many people in the back and then continue as if it didnt happen again?

I wrote a script to delete over 10,000 reddit comments from my accounts there when they enshittified past the point of no return last year. Yes, the whole point is to devalue the site so that old search results are broken and people stop considering it a worthwhile place. The remaining users who are docile enough to remain on a shit site are holding the internet back from evolving through better sites.

Hard no. There is such a thing as the right to forget. At least in Europe. Stackoverflow likes to take that right away as it earns them more money, but that is never a good reason.

That's not what that set of laws/norms covers at all.

Try publishing a book with any European publisher and then "right to be forgottening" it out of existence.

Right to forget can be achieved by unlinking the content from you, though, and making sure it contains no personal identifiable information. Doesn't mean it needs to be deleted.

Specifically since what you've posted on SO you've shared as CC BY-SA.

The right to forget is about removing personal information from a site, or removing articles about you from search results. An answer to a Stackoverflow question isn't really personal info.

"Hard no. There is such a thing as the right to forget."

This only exists as a wish, but is not written in stone and some people actually disagree to that.

Actually it does exists, as part of GDPR and then added into the law of individual EU nations.

Whether it applies to Stack Overflow posts is another discussion. IMO it doesn't due to Creative Commons licensing.

The right to be forgotten does not mean you content has to be taken down, just that it no longer has to be associable with you.

> The right to be forgotten does not mean you content has to be taken down

As with almost anything GDPR: it really depends on the content, on the website, on the situation. There's no clear cut answer that applies to all cases.

And copyright law also enters into the picture here, which is why I added the second paragraph.

As I understand it, the right to be forgotten is a related but distinct concept to the GDPR.

A right to one's own expression/speech is a basic human right.

Deleting your past speech is not a basic human right, for good reasons:

Imagine e.g. the effect on democracy of politicians being able to have all of their past utterances deleted from the public record because they don't feel like it represents their current branding anymore.

For private individuals not "of public interest", the situation is a bit different, but e.g. the EU's "right to be forgotten" is arguably not a basic human right, but a relatively new and narrow concept for which there isn't any type of international consensus yet.

I have a right for you to forget that it was me who signed that contract with you!

Is this true? I don't disagree with the idea, but do you really have the _right_ to delete some previous thing you've said no matter where it is? Seems untenable.

There is no basic human right of “takesies backsies” though - that seems more like the relevant question, along with IP ownership.

The right to delete your own words after uttering them (and giving some company a license to reproduce them no less) is dubious. I guess it exists in the EU with their "right to be forgotten" and GDPR stuff, but I think not in most of the rest of the world.

> They stopped being exclusively yours to take back once you contributed them to a broader conversation.

Says who, exactly? Stack Overflow, previously, did not say this. Reddit threads get deleted all the time. Facebook posts slide into the ephemeral "past" and are never seen again. Old forums die entirely, with nothing but (hopefully) a copy on the wayback machine.

And that's just regular old rot, in this case, Stack Overflow is explicitly changing the rules on what they can do with writing provided by volunteers under a previous understood agreement, to a new agreement, with no opportunity for negotiation and no engagement with their community. Simply an edict, issued from On High: "We can now sell your contributions to AI companies." And I'm sure for plenty of people they don't give a shit, but clearly some do, and so we get what HN is constantly clamoring for, individuals making decisions about their own creations and their own speech, but now it's suddenly bad because it's the Wrong decision.

You're mistaken. All content on SO has always been creative commons licensed when you post it. Hence all spam duplicates on Google but also other cool usage of the massive data. They aren't retrospectively changing anything.

Edit: source https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing CC BY-SA

In that case they are changing what they do instead of changing a rule about what they do. A difference with a slight distinction.

The point is: people don't want their code used to train code bots. Their wishes should be respected. Not because it's legally required, but because they are our peers in this industry and worthy of respect.

It’s fair use. Get used to it

You aren't factually wrong, but this attitude is probably why developers are torching their accounts over this. Legally being in the clear is not the same thing as ethically being in the clear, and the continued abuse by the public square by these giant, faceless corporations is just engendering more hostility.

And it's all well and good to make those decisions, but if code-generating AI is anything like text-generating AI, they're going to want more. Probably not a great plan to piss off all the people who produce the thing you need, for free, before you have enough of it. Assuming there is such a thing as enough of it, of course.

Everyone knew it went into the database and the fair use if you had been around SO since the beginning was always part of the deal. SO even serves ads.

These “developers” are very immature and naive.

SO is a business

> Stack Overflow, previously, did not say this.

It's always a good idea to read the copyright/usage terms of sites you might be contributing to.

Stack Overflow has been very transparently licensing their content under creative commons since the beginning; that's a big part of why I occasionally contribute to it.

It was always that way, the user content has always been CC-licensed. And SO has suspended users for deleting/vandalizing their own posts for a long time.

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