Right now, on Stack Overflow, Luigi Magione’s account has been renamed. Despite having fruitfully contributed to the network he is stripped of his name and his account is now known as “user4616250”.

This appears to violate the creative commons license under which Stack Overflow content is posted.

When the author asked about this:

As of yet, Stack Exchange has not replied to the above post, but they did promptly and within hours gave me a year-long ban for merely raising the question. Of course, they did draft a letter which credited the action to other events that occurred weeks before where I merely upvoted contributions from Luigi and bountied a few of his questions.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    24 hours ago

    The company was sold shortly after, so maybe animals can sense their pending extinction (some of them anyway)?

    More likely the changes were made to improve the “saleability” of the website.

    I miss those days when writing an answer genuinely felt like helping to grow the global community of friend developers.

    One of the promises of the internet was, supposedly, that it couldn’t really be monopolized because the barriers to entry were so low. But what we’ve seen is the influence of the Networking Effect as a means of consolidating user bases, combined with a cartel-style censorship that limits the degree to which word-of-mouth can influence a nascent community’s growth.

    And now the AI comes to fully alienate us from each other, leaving even the more token communities with a “am I talking to a real person or a computer facsimile” lingering dread with each passing year.