It has been interesting seeing the effects.

* The most apparent immediate effect was on Ask Ubuntu, where the diamond moderators no longer handling spam with their tools that can delete it immediately meant that the ordinary moderators had to handle it the longer and harder way with accumulated votes to close. There was a lot more off-topic advertising staying visible for longer almost as soon as the strike began. The difference was noticeable on the first day. As I write this 5 out of the top 10 active Q&As are egregious spam. This is higher visibility than before the strike.

* The effects at SuperUser and AskDifferent have been less prominent than at Ask Ubuntu.

* As I have observed elsewhere, the brakes are off at SQA stackexchange, with the 2 prolific ChatGPT regurgitators now going into open competition with each other.

* Conversely, although there are localized cases like SQA stackexchange, there doesn't appear to have been a widespread gold rush to post machine-written answers now that it is public that they aren't going to be zapped and their posters aren't going to be suspended.

There are several things that clearly a lot of people commenting here don't know:

* There is a difference between a moderator and a diamond moderator on Stack Exchange.

** Pretty much all of the grumbles in the past 2 hours of this discussion have nothing to do with diamond moderators, yet it is the diamond moderators that have the access to the confidential moderators-only discussion forum, that were subject to the secret policy directive sent out therein, that can issue account suspensions, and who are the major participants in the strike.

** Everyone with even a modicum of points is a moderator. This point has been long-touted in the introduction pages to the sites, and was a selling-point of the system in the first place. Ironically, diamond moderators often don't partake in the actions that are being once again grumbled about in a Hacker News submission that has the words "Stack Overflow" in its headline, because adding the diamond moderator flag to their accounts turns their tools into supervotes, and they actually get feedback and advice to not do the things that ordinary people do. If you've seen comments on a question or downvotes, or votes to close as duplicates, these are from the hundreds of thousands of people with moderation capabilities on the various sites, almost always not from the people who have gone on strike here.

** Ironically, the people who have gone on strike did so because they were given secret instructions that, had they enforced them, would have made it seem that they weren't following the published policies and were not doing their jobs.

* There are 181 Stack Exchange sites. This is a general strike.

** Some of the people involved, particularly the ones from Academia stackexchange, object to ChatGPT in very strong terms indeed. One Academia SE person in discussions has repeatedly made the point that questions and answers in that arena are often life-changing, and machine-written answers have far more frequent potential to be disastrous.

** Yes, jlericson is also at fault for misrepresenting things, calling this a "Stack Overflow strike" when it is more than that. It's a catchy click-bait title. But although it garners the attention of more people than "Stack Exchange" probably would, it conversely hides the fact that some of the smaller SE sites have different problems with ChatGPT. "But the code worked after I fixed the obvious problems! So how is this answer a problem?" is a meaningless counterargument to machine-written answer objections on many of the sites, which have nothing to do with computer code.