R.R.R.R.R., one tool used for curation, developed earlier this year

Techrights put on pause some of its news curation activity this past Tuesday. The reason? The signal-to-noise (s/n) ratio in the news (the rate of adequate journalism rather than "filler") is too low. In some cases, for some domains, for every real news story there would be 5-10 SPAM items, either some sponsored fodder or sales disguised as an 'article'. Yet worse, a lot of deliberate misinformation, i.e. disinformation, is being published. This can harm people's mental health and embolden extremist worldviews. The extent of this problem is unprecedented. We've seen domains that, instead of going offline with some dignity, simply became spamfarms (for money). Even some former "LINUX" sites have become exclusively spam. A few of them actively promote the opposite of Linux. The situation is barely tenable as it seems to be further aggravated each week in every way. The deterioration is continuous and any prospects of amelioration require a lot of manual work, such as filtering and curation. It's a lot of work. It's more and more work each month if not every week. It'll get worse over time.

"It might take only 30 minutes per day to trot through every worthy coverage of GNU/Linux issues on the World Wide Web."This sentiment is shared among several of us. Three months ago we focused on developing some tools for curation, but even those tools are now challenged by a really awful s/n ratio. Since the site OpenSource.com was shut down (IBM made some face-saving excuses two months later because we had chastised them for it), several more "LINUX" sites became SPAM (or worse), and even finding an adequate number/quality of news about GNU/Linux is no longer easy. It might take only 30 minutes per day to trot through every worthy coverage of GNU/Linux issues on the World Wide Web. Gemini is growing, but it's still nowhere near the magnitude of the Web.

We must thus carefully reconsider how we curate and bring you Daily Links. The Daily Links turned 15 not too long ago (this past February) and we have no intention of stopping them (we recently expanded them to Gemini/Gopher). The question is, how can we do this more effectively? Please feel free to contact us via E-mail or IRC. Any suggestions can help us help you (with Daily Links). We may spend the next few days focusing some more on deep thinking and coding. ⬆