It’s reminiscent of Reddit moderators trying to shut down their subreddits in protest recently.

At the time they thought they were doing what everybody wanted, forcing Reddit executives to bend to their will, and taking control of the platform.

In reality, the only people who were inconvenienced were the users who couldn’t get info they needed for a few weeks. The vast majority of people didn’t care about the issue because they didn’t use 3rd party clients (especially those who were casual users, unlike the power mods). A few months later the protests are all but forgotten and the sentiment has shifted so far that Reddit mods are viewed as the villains most of the time.

Six months from now, I bet this protest will also be forgotten. When people click on Google links to Stack Overflow and find the key answer missing, the villain will be the SO user who threw a tantrum and deleted their post, with the original drama being long forgotten.