1. They want to sell the company.
2. It is readily apparent that at least one suitor really wants binding, non-disclosable arbitration and no threat of class action lawsuits.
3. We can only guestimate what this new potential owner will do with all of our contributions.

Relicensing our past content as their own -and then- suing us on copyright infringement is a real possibility.

That's why I will be deleting all of my content and accounts across all Stack Exchange sites before June 3rd 2018. And I have a 10,000+ rep on SO and have been really big on this community.

I refuse to let my good-will donations of knowledge and code fall into the hands of morally-ambiguous (at best) new corporate overlords who will do Who Knows What without the majority of the affected being able to do much if anything about it.

1. They want to sell the company.
2. It is readily apparent that at least one suitor really wants binding, non-disclosable arbitration and no threat of class action lawsuits.
3. We can only guestimate what this new potential owner will do with all of our contributions.

Relicensing our past content as their own -and then- suing us on copyright infringement is a real possibility.

That's why I will be deleting all of my content and accounts across all Stack Exchange sites before June 3rd 2018. And I have a 10,000+ rep on SO and have been really big on this community.

I refuse to let my good-will donations of knowledge and code fall into the hands of morally-ambiguous (at best) new corporate overlords who will do Who Knows What without the majority of the affected being able to do much if anything about it.

UPDATE: After writing this post, I started deleting my questions / answers starting with the most karma first. But the moderators threatened to block my account after my 5th post removal, and they also restored all of them as they were before.

I told them, "Great! Delete my account and all the questions/answers, too!" They said 'Nuh uh, we basically own it now!!!" and told me that the best i could hope for is to not receive ANY social credit for what I made, which sounds ludicrous to me. When I escalated it further, I was informed that if I chose to delete my account, anyway, they'd put this matter in front of some sort of tribunal, since I had ~11k karma at the time and how they would probably just, you know, anonymize my posts on StackExchange sites.

This is something they sent me: "Content you've posted on the site is owned by you, but licensed to Stack Exchange, and you therefore cannot request that it be deleted with your account. Your posts will be effectively dissociated from your account; your username will no longer show on them, but it will instead show your denormalized username (e.g. "user123456" where 123456 was the user ID of your account)."

So I've adapted. Absolutely zero contributions from my own, my company's or by my developers source code, even the permissive open source licensed ones. I know I can yank those permanently from GitHub if, for instance, Microsoft starts going rogue again.

But if, say, LinkedIn buys StackExchange and starts doing shenanigans, because of this whole opt out bs, my corporation (which couldn't opt out) and our developers (none of whom did opt out) could lose control of those lines of code and we'd have no real legal recourse.

1. They want to sell the company.
2. It is readily apparent that at least one suitor REALLY WANTS binding, non-disclosable arbitration AND no threat of class action lawsuits.
3. We can only guestimate what this new potential owner will do with all of our contributions.

Relicensing our past content as their own -and then- suing us on copyright infringement is a REAL possibility.

That's why I will be deleting all of my content and accounts across all StackExchange sites before June 3rd. And I have a 10,000+ rep on SO and have been really big on this community.

I refuse to let my good-will donations of knowledge and code fall into the hands of morally-ambiguous (at best) new corporate overlords who will do Who Knows What without the majority of the affected being able to do much if anything about it.

1. They want to sell the company.
2. It is readily apparent that at least one suitor really wants binding, non-disclosable arbitration and no threat of class action lawsuits.
3. We can only guestimate what this new potential owner will do with all of our contributions.

Relicensing our past content as their own -and then- suing us on copyright infringement is a real possibility.

That's why I will be deleting all of my content and accounts across all Stack Exchange sites before June 3rd 2018. And I have a 10,000+ rep on SO and have been really big on this community.

I refuse to let my good-will donations of knowledge and code fall into the hands of morally-ambiguous (at best) new corporate overlords who will do Who Knows What without the majority of the affected being able to do much if anything about it.