That's nothing for a meta post with an unpopular announcement, there are quite a few with hundreds of downvotes. But yes, this does likely indicate something about how the active SE users feel about this. It doesn't help that the blog is written in a way that is much more likely to appeal to shareholders than software developers on SO. But ChatGPT has been a quite significant moderation issue, and the blog post doesn't address any of this (it is kinda devoid of content in general beyond "SE will do something with generative AI, updates later this year").

Oh, there is at least one that I can think of! Puneet Mulchandani (director of Product at SO) announced "Jobs & Developer Story" sunset. It got more than 4200 downvotes. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...

score:-2000..-500 is:q brings out some of the greatest hits.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=score%3A-2000..-500+...

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=score%3A-2000..-500+...

The range is tinker able.

meta forums on SE sites see disagreement a lot more often than the regular answers areas. These are usually longtime SE users with a minimum of site credit to participate. So while these are are not the bulk of SE users their voices should ring louder imo.

have I been missing something all these years? How do you see reply votes? I only see # points (not actual up/down vote count) on my own replies, and the OP.

I believe you need a certain amount of points to unlock the feature. I couldn’t tell you how many unfortunately, I haven’t used SO much in years.

Click on the votes themselves. This is at 1000 points as sort of a rate limit so that only a fraction of the site can do it) and to ensure that people understand the nuance of voting better.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/established-u...

You can also get a lot of vote information in the data explorer https://data.stackexchange.com

"That's pretty telling how the community feels about being used as training data"

I don't think most of the replies on SO mention this directly, they mostly focus on how this will impact the site's quality negatively. But really you are correct that people don't like being used as training data and imo the "arguments" everyone are making against AI disadvantages on SO, on art sites, on wherever else are pretty much "excuses". Quoted because even if they are correct they are just excuses for the core much more ethical issue - humans don't want to be replaced. Being replaced by a machine is even shittier. Being replaced by a machine that exploited your own hard work against you even more so.

In a real world example if my boss hired a junior whom I must mentor with the sole purpose of me being fired and replaced so he can pay him less. Well that would be considered very unethical even though it does happen and many workers do put up with it. Yet the current AI movement is that on an unprecedented scale and to the people being replaced it must feel like a massive bitch slap in the face.

To me it seems like an extreme expression of power and it's bizzare how many people are fine with it.