Yeah SO was great. Despite all the complaining, all developers I know used it daily. Of course now it's obsolete since GPT extracted it's entire dataset & provides a much better way of finding what you need. They should honestly sue the hell out of them, they deserve at least some royalties for the developer subscriptions from Claude & OpenAI.
The SO data was always licensed as CC-attr (I think?) so LLMs could and should use it. The SO value was never supposed to be the data; it was the platform and community, and this is the part SO (VC-fueled version) has destroyed.
I'm just glad Jeff and Joel got their payday. Jeff really deserved to win the internet lottery, and on the whole Joel was a net positive for the internet and my career personally.
