The author of this LinkedIn post thinks he’s describing something great in Stack Overflow’s licensing of its Q&A data to AI companies and making much more revenue that way than it did as an open Q&A site. But what he’s actually describing is just one more instance of the growing trend of AI to destroy the real value of whatever it consumes.

Stack Overflow’s “death by AI” is personal because I was one of its public beta testers before it launched. I wrote some of the original questions and answers that seeded the site before it went live. The mistake is in seeing Stack Overflow as “just” Q&A pairs, and edge cases, and war stories. It was a community of people—far from perfect—but one that helped me get better at the work of software engineering.

It was a community that spawned a pretty good tech conference, Stack Overflow Dev Days, that I attended and learned a lot from. Stack Overflow also launched a job board that ultimately helped me find a job in healthcare IT. Thanks to that job, I visited South by Southwest and reunited with friends and former colleagues I hadn’t seen in a decade.

Good for Stack Overflow for making millions of dollars off our donated time I guess. But what they’re selling can only decrease in value over time because they destroyed the diverse communities of people who originated, grew and sustained that value. Whatever knowledge these companies grow inside their walls is necessarily limited by who’s inside their walls. No company has a monopoly on the best people or the best solutions to problems.

Wikipedia banning the vast majority of AI-generated content is just the latest instance of the growing pushback we’re seeing to what GenAI does. Open source project maintainers are banning AI-generated PRs because the vast majority of them are crap that doesn’t add value. This doesn’t mean that GenAI isn’t capable of impressive and genuinely useful things. But its utility still depends heavily on the skill of who is using it. And anyone who thinks this—or any other tool—can replace community and not destroy something truly necessary and valuable is sadly mistaken.