At this point I’m assuming most if not all of these content deals are essentially retroactive. They already scrapped the content and found it useful enough to try and secure future use, or at least exclude competitors.

Honestly? I'm down with that. And when the LLM's end up pricing themselves out of usefulness, we'll still have the fediverse version. Having free sites on the net with solid crowd-sourced information is never a bad thing even if other people pick up the data and use it.

It's when private sites like Duolingo and Reddit crowd source the information and then slowly crank down the free aspect that we have the problems.

The Ad sponsored web model is not viable forever.

I’d rather the harvesting be open to all than only the company hosting it.

Assuming the federated version allowed contributor-chosen licenses (similar to GitHub), any harvesting in violation of the license would be subject to legal action.

Contrast that with Stack Exchange, where I assume the terms dictated by Stack Exchange deprive contributors of recourse.

SO already was. Not even harvested as much as handed to them. Periodic data dumps and a general forced commitment to open information were a big part of the reason they won out over other sites that used to compete with them. SO most likely wouldn't have existed if Experts Exchange didn't paywall their entire site.

As with everything else, AI companies believe their training data operates under fair use, so they will discard the CC-SA-4.0 license requirements regardless of whether this deal exists. (And if a court ever finds it's not fair use, they are so many layers of fucked that this situation won't even register.)

But users and instances would be able to state that they do not want their content commercialized. On StackOverflow you have no control over that.

Smells too much like duo-lingo. Here, everyone jump in and answers all the questions. 5 years later, ohh look at this gold mine of community data we own....

Oh this looks decent. British non-profit, I like it. Registering.

Yeah but didn't you see the sovereign citizens who think licenses are magic posting giant copyright notices after their posts? Lol

It's so childish, ai tools will help billions of the poorest people access life saving knowledge and services, help open source devs like myself create tools that free people from the clutches of capitalism, but they like living in a world of inequity because their generational wealth earned from centuries of exploitation of the impoverished allows them a better education, better healthcare, and better living standards than the billions of impoverished people on the planet so they'll fight to maintain their privilege even if they're fighting against their own life getting better too. The most pathetic thing is they pretend to be fighting a moral crusade, as if using the answers they freely posted and never expected anything in return for is a real injustice!

And yes I know people are going to pretend that they think tech bros won't allow poor people to use their tech and they base this on assuming how everything always works will suddenly just flip Into reverse at some point or something? Like how mobile phones are only for rich people and only rich people can sell via the internet and only rich people can start a YouTube channel...

Federated yahoo answers.

Hey, early Yahoo answers was very useful. A de-shittified, federated, stripped down to the bare questions-answers network could be neat.