I caught wind of a new insight (credit: @leanne), that enables some foreshight into aspects of the possible future.
The following quote is to be found as the update section at the bottom of this post:
After doing some research on Prosus and checking out the StackOverflow blog entry from April 2023, Is this the AI renaissance? (Ep. 564): I can say that
Prosus has known about AI and its workings for years.
They have their own AI team.
They have purchased StackExchange, Udemy, CodeAcademy, and other learning sites.
Based on this information, I posit that "the writing's on the wall": Prosus is going to be using these sites' data for its own search/learning system that they can possibly hugely monetize. Soon, no more "volunteers" needed...
And, if international corporations, like US corporations, are beholden to their shareholders... well, that's why they seem to not care about their volunteers.
We, the AskUbuntu community are on this platform with a specific mission.
The above speculated developments however do not seem to be aligned with our goals.
We need to take this seriously.
Please, anyone well-connected and insightful among you, start preparing the work on a possible migration away from the StackExchange infrastructure, so that when it proves necessary, you can tackle it well-prepared.
Thank you, and bless Linux and Ubuntu.
Update:
Considering that the strike did not yet get resolved, and I see sentiment that may project another exodus of existing users, I wonder if that exodus would be enough to impact SE's normal operation even before they could pivot to their AI-oriented business model.
In other words, the strike sentiment may trigger complications sooner than otherwise expected.
Update 2:
I forgot that they also made the strike-triggering, limiting policy about moderating AI content that may already be compromising the accuracy of our information.
If SE doesn't sufficiently revert that policy, then we can reckon with our information having started to decay sometime of the beginning of this week.
A decay that
- keeps proliferating further every day
- we won't be able to repair
as long as we are on this platform.