First off, info about the strike, with links to why AI-generated content is not trustworthy or welcome on the network:
I am not an elected moderator, but I am on strike for the duration. What does that mean? Well, my participation on all Stack Exchange platforms, including Stack Overflow (SO) and Biology.SE, is effectively curtailed. I will no longer be voting or commenting on, flagging, editing, or otherwise interacting with content, both new and existing.
Just to be absolutely clear: it really upsets me to have to do this, seeing how things have come this far between the Stack Exchange, Inc. (SE) corporate entity and the community-elected, volunteer moderators. Through means I am not going to discuss publicly, I have seen relevant portions of the mod-only communication that the company sent on Memorial Day dictating the new policy and how mods should act, and they are significantly different. Both the original public company announcement of the policy and the statement from them I linked above are completely misleading, if not downright deceitful, when talking about mods' actions and methods before issuing suspensions, although the recent statement does try to walk that smear job back a bit. They have shown zero evidence of any of their claims, either to mods or the general public. They've broken their own agreement with the moderators on how policy announcements should be rolled out - i.e., with plenty of warning and taking mod and public comments into consideration. There was no discussion of this new policy. It also directly contradicts overwhelming mod and public sentiment, that the current generation of generative AIs like ChatGPT are directly harmful to the Stack Exchange model of community-reviewed, expert-generated content. I could go on and on, but my sentiments are reflected in many of the links I gave above as well as resources they link to.
I'm not a moderator here and don't yet have access to some of the moderation tools that come with 20k+ rep, so I can't give a full answer to the question of how this will impact this site specifically. What I can say, if all four of our moderators agree to strike, is that you should expect to see numerous low-quality answers, often from new 1-rep users, appearing everywhere, on new and older questions alike. Flags won't get handled, or will be delayed. Low-quality and off-topic questions won't get closed quickly. Once the strike is over this garbage will be taken care of, but until then it'll remain. Feel free to contact SE if this becomes a problem for you - the more complaints they get about the lack of moderator actions on your favorite site(s), the more pressure they'll be under. Please be polite!
What can you do to help? If you sign up for a free Stack Overflow account (or already have one), you can sign the open letter. You can change your username (remember you can only change it once every 30 days), preferably putting some information in the About section for those interested. You can choose to not participate in some or all of the community curation actions you might otherwise do. You can contact SE directly. You can participate in this and other Meta discussions. Our mods do so much for our sites - the success of the business and the SE websites relies immensely on their volunteer work, and they are being treated horribly. This is absolutely not a one-time occurrence.
What should you not do? Don't deface or vandalize your own or other posts. Don't harass SE employees. This is not about individuals, but about the corporate entity. State your opinion, but be nice.
