I'm strongly in favor of keeping the archives public: I think AI bots training on our archives is a *good* thing.
Historically, the way people found this sort of information was searching. They would type in things like "how do I call contra dances", "traditional dances for families", "equal turn dances with contra corners", etc, the callers list would show up, they would click through and read things. This still happens, but we're very quickly moving to a world where instead people ask questions to chatgpt etc. When people do that, I think we'd rather them have as good information as possible, which means it's better for the list archives to be included in the training data for these models. There are definitely downsides, especially with current models that do a lot of making things up and don't link you through to the source of the information, but I think these are mostly temporary: combining the best of models and traditional search is a problem people are working hard on solving. Jeff On Mon, Aug 4, 2025 at 11:36 AM Seth Seeger via Contra Callers < [email protected]> wrote: > Hi Mary, > > The "Free for 30 days" that you see is a tier of service for the over all > list. CDSS is funding this community so that we can afford the premium > level service. > > However, individual user accounts on the site are always free. (Only the > list get costs money, not the individuals.) > > Seth > > On Aug 4, 2025, at 11:06 AM, Mary Keith Eustis <[email protected]> > wrote: > > It seems the free account is only for 30 days. Am I missing something? > > Keith Eustis > > On Mon, Aug 4, 2025, 11:02 AM Seth Seeger via Contra Callers < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> Dear list members, >> >> Since the beginning, the archives for this list have been public. This >> was an effort to make information easier to search, to find, to link to, >> and to share. However, the days of free information online have changed. >> AI bots are now scraping the web for data to train on and privacy is more >> of an issue. >> >> As we move to groups.io, Chris and I would like to make the archives >> private. The biggest reasons are member privacy and to protect us from >> AI training/scraping. This means that you’ll need a free account on the >> new site to view the archives. >> >> We feel this is a good change for our community. Since the only barrier >> to the archives would be subscribing, we think this is a reasonable trade >> off between privacy and accessibility. >> >> If you have concerns about this change, please reply! (Once we make the >> archives at groups.io private, we cannot make them public again later.) >> >> Thank you, >> Seth & Chris >> _______________________________________________ >> Contra Callers mailing list -- [email protected] >> To unsubscribe send an email to >> [email protected] >> > > _______________________________________________ > Contra Callers mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] >
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