Is it legally feasible to fork StackOverflow and create a competing platform using the same content? Or is the license just window dressing to provide contributors with the feeling that they could do that if they wanted to... but not really.
Legally? yes. The users own the content, SO only has a license to do as they please and users have already given CC license to anyone (that is the nature of copyleft after all).
Is it feasible to build a community that will contribute, and also get the search traffic[1], and be economically viable, particularly in the post LLM world? I don't think so.
In today's world with gen AI, the drive to contribute and maintain suck knowledge stores is simply not there, SO itself is facing a > 60% drop in new questions even as far as 2 years back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38984742 (2023).
The tech itself is pretty trivial, even distributed and truly community operated like Wikis are, content creation will be the biggest challenge and i don't see the strong community motivation to maintain knowledge bases like this anymore.
[1] Search engines will negatively penalize the domain for just hosting duplicated content without any extra intent to stifle a new player etc.
>Is it feasible to build a community that will contribute, and also get the search traffic[1], and be economically viable, particularly in the post LLM world? I don't think so.
To be honest, it's more feasible than ever because of LLMs. I imagine more and more grassroots for "human communities" will be advertised as those weary of LLMs tire and migrate. Having systems guaranteed to be humans will be a selling point. Not guaranteed to surpass SO, I imagine it will get a sizeable community.
The downside is that, short of a very fast updating anti-bot captcha, users will more or less need strict identification to enter. Either via a premium payment or showing real life ID. Very unpopular models in the US. we'll have to see if the hate for AI overrides the will to give up anonymity (at least on the backend) or putting their wallets where their mouths are.
I think it’s a seriously good idea. I believe they could create problems during the content scraping phase but considering that Internet Archive has most of the content already, I don’t see how they could legally prevent such a move if you’re careful with their trademarks and other intellectual properties like logos and look-and-feel.
There are many sites that rehash popular questions from Stack Overflow and other Q and A sites. I regard the scraped content as search spam. Of course, there isn't the same ideological motive behind it. I imagine that SO retains some kind of IP rights to their content.
Completely legal. But in public opinion, you won't be able to attract any users away from the real site, and your site will be indistinguishable from all of those content scraping SEO spam sites that get heavily penalized by search engines.
