overapplication of suspensions for AI-generated content may be turning away a large number of legitimate contributors to the site
The new owner does not seem to understand that the value of the these sites is the reliability of the information that is amassed here. That the information here, until now, was produced by invested authentic contributors in good faith. That's what draws people to these sites.
The new owner, according to my knowledge, is Prosus N.V. On their portfolio page, they currently seem to list 88 online businesses that are their property. With that many properties, they apparently don't have time to study and realize what makes Stackexchange valuable.
They just go after the generic capitalist metric: number of users. We are no more than a bodycount, from now on. The nature of our contributions, Prosus does not recognize.
Furthermore, on the aforementioned portfolio page (in the "Edtech" category) they list only StackOverflow, which is only the flagship of the network of these sites. They seem to ignore that StackOverflow is only a part of the whole. And so they appear to express complete disinterest in the rest of the stackexchange sites.
If they unleash AI content on these sites, that will undermine the usability of these sites and dilute their value at the same time.
What is interesting, is if they make StackOverflow unusable, the entire world will feel that. The most impactful human creations these times rely on code. Accordingly, disrupting StackOverflow (and Unix&Linux) may disrupt industries, public authorities, and with those, our societies.
But Prosus seem to have only money, and not expertise.
And the Stackexchange home team appears to be missing in action too! (Though the Monica Cellio case, its aftermath, and the massive quality hit that the network suffered then, had demonstrated their true attitudes years ago.)
AI is on our necks, disrupting everything digital; the self-organization networks of our societies are under threat.
Twitter is destroyed, the owners of Reddit are following, greedflation to be observed globally (the capitalist owning class is cashing their investments out as quick as they can, nobody seems to be interested in sustainable business any more (because they don't even know how to do that any more, under the given conditions)), education getting systematically dismantled, billionaires prepping their bunkers.
This may well be a decided, coordinated meltdown.
The possible trigger could have been insights into AI potential, I seem to have read somewhere. (Those insights are not necessarily new; insiders might have enjoyed years of leeway, behind closed doors.)
I say, it's time to scrape Stackexchange and save it somewhere for after the impending world war. Like that seed vault in the Arctic.
In the meanwhile, it would be worth asking Canonical if they would be interested in hosting us somewhere else.
Gentlefolks, it has been a privilege playing with you tonight.
Regardless of what happens tomorrow, I thank you all, network-wide, for this opportunity to develop personally with you. It's been, and is, an honor.