Sahil Chelaramani

I don’t think people realize how selfless and wonderful the StackOverflow’s founders were. Unlike reddit, x etc they insisted ALL of their content will be 100% open, nothing will ever be locked up in walled garden. They made it a point by even offering structured data downloads! They didn’t cared people cloning the website. They didn’t worry about putting the whole monetization thing at risk. It was a true hacker spirit in it’s purest form. Most folks won’t be able to grasp how hard this is. You are on top of the world. Millions of people depend on you daily. You have the rarest opportunity to rack in billions. And you still stay true to your principles. This exactly in turn later enabled AI revolution. I still remember downloading entire SO archives and preparing it for pre-training while Reddit and others went onto lawfare and firewalling the content. Note that this was the content their users - not reddit employees - had created for free and voluntarily to help others and the world. But they locked it all up for profiting from it personally. SO did none of that. I think they knew they will be sacrificed at the altar. Yet it will exactly serve the intent of their founding principles to help others and the world, now through AI, even at bigger scale. All of today’s models are built upon efforts of such true pure hackers who spent their days and years to create training data for AIs. I was a proud SO contributer for many years and there are couple of times while testing models I did felt that models might have used my answers 😇. Hats off to @codinghorror and @spolsky and so many builders and hackers at SO for moving the world forward, one revolution at a time 🫡.