AI Didn't Start the Fire: Examining the Stack Exchange Moderator and Contributor Strike

Abstract

Online communities and their host platforms are mutually dependent yet conflict-prone. When platform policies clash with community values, communities have resisted through strikes, blackouts, and even migration to other platforms. Through such collective actions, communities have sometimes won concessions but these have frequently proved temporary. Prior research has investigated strike events and migration chains, but the processes by which community-platform conflict unfolds remain obscure. How do community-platform relationships deteriorate? How do communities organize collective action? How do participants proceed in the aftermath? We investigate a conflict between the Stack Exchange platform and community that occurred in 2023 around an emergency arising from the release of large language models (LLMs). Based on a qualitative thematic analysis of 2,070 messages on Meta Stack Exchange and 14 interviews with community members, we surface how the 2023 conflict was preceded by a long-term deterioration in the community-platform relationship driven in particular by the platform's disregard for the community's highly-valued participatory role in governance. Moreover, the platform's policy response to LLMs aggravated the community's sense of crisis triggering the strike mobilization. We analyze how the mobilization was coordinated through a tiered leadership and communication structure, as well as how community members pivoted in the aftermath. Building on recent theoretical scholarship in social computing, we use Hirshman's exit, voice and loyalty framework to theorize the challenges of community-platform relations evinced in our data. Finally, we recommend ways that platforms and communities can institute participatory governance to be durable and effective.