The saga on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, and how tech always serves the ruling class.

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.

      • @486@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0•3 months ago

        Of course they aren’t small, but they are probably as small as it gets, since they are pretty efficiently compressed. I am not sure what you mean by

        it’s not a straightforward operation for even the average developer or systems engineer to restore these into a working format

        since it is really trivial to use them. Just load them with Kiwix and serve them as a website. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

          • CodexArcanumEnglish
            0•3 months ago

            I looked into doing something similar with Winipedia and the recommendation is also to use Kiwix, and the offline file size is also very large.

            Welcome to the collapse! Hoarding “clean data” for personal use is like hoarding clean water and food: you need a place to keep it, and it starts going stale the minute you shelve it. So either buy a digital bunker to load up with what you need or ask the all knowing AI gods for answers like the other poors.

            Also the Stack Exchange software used to be open source, surely there’s still a fork somewhere. You could certainly run your own Developer QA site, but like with Lemmy, the problem then is getting enough traffic to be able to productively tap into the collective wisdom.

          • @486@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0•3 months ago

            When hosting this locally, I don’t see how 200 GB is much of an issue. Storage is so cheap these days, if you want to host it locally, just buy a 256 GB SSD just for that data for $20. Anyway, you were asking for a mirror, to which I replied with the information about the ZIM files. I don’t really understand the issue. Stackoverflow just isn’t that small, there is not much you can do about that.

            I think it’d take a few hours to setup even a smaller copy of SO, which isn’t ideal for answering a quick question.

            The download? Maybe, depends on your Internet connection’s speed. Actually serving it as a website certainly doesn’t take hours. It is rather a matter of seconds.