10.21.22
Gemini version available ♊︎Way to Go, Phoronix (How to Alienate the Audience)
Three days ago: A Third of Phoronix is Microsoft Openwashing Puff Pieces (Today at Least)
So far today (it’s only about 8AM where Phoronix is based*):
Summary: Desperate for stories (because news is relatively slow), Mr. Larabel looks for ‘action’ in the wrong places and opts for clickbait, probably for better “engagement” through “entertainment”** (provocation). The situation worsened a lot lately***. The quality of the posts too deteriorated****, not just the relevance and quality of the links*****. Some posts are pure Microsoft propaganda******, relayed without any critical skills or basic, much-needed scepticism (the comments are a lot more informative than the posts).
_____________
* Even earlier for the stories above. Lots of Microsoft. By 4AM already two Microsoft stories.
** What he told me about it when I asked him years ago. He explained why he had covered even ‘pure’ Microsoft news (for illegitimate reasons, ‘business’ reasons).
*** For those who missed it, Phoronix is reposting a lot of marketing material without any scrutiny, and is moreover taking large gifts from large companies, which is why earlier this year (after about 15 years of linking to almost every post there) we stopped abruptly.
**** A lot of Phoronix “stories” nowadays are just single “tweets” turned into ‘articles’ with many links from Phoronix to itself (driving “engagement”, not adding much to the actual “tweet”). Sometimes there are long walls of text concerning very short and almost negligible commits, like two lines being changed in some header (.h) file. A screenshot gets slapping in to cushion the post with non-substance (like a screenshot of the text of the commit).
***** Many links unnecessarily feed Microsoft GitHub, which is proprietary software (also GPL violation machine), even though GitHub has only mirrors of the real repositories. It would help to link to the original repositories, not Microsoft mirrors of these.
****** The ‘softness’ on Microsoft is very evident from shallow, non-analytical coverage, such as the above. Any person who knows how GNU/Linux works (Phoronix very well understands that) would not mistake Microsoft for an ally or even a neutral party.
ᶃ Gemini Space
This post is also available in 
Content is available under CC-BY-SA