Video download link | md5sum ab5a703760e54fc0249557ffd067a780 Swirling Down the Drain Again Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: Social Control Media giants have been having many issues lately (Reddit, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube are among those); to make matter worse, with "link tax" being implemented -- at least in Canada for now -- Social Control Media giants such as Facebook will starve remaining news sites some more (not that news sites are so good anymore)

THE video above sums up the state of the Web, in particular media sites and social control media. Things deteriorate rapidly. This further deterioration can be sensed every week, not just every month. There's less material, less original material, less accurate material (casual disinformation), and so on.

It is meanwhile worth noting that even TikTok is having severe issues (resignations at the top and fresh scandals^*), not just American social control media "companies" (bubbles). YouTube is having downtimes, so one can tell that things aren't rosy, to say the least. While the Web is a garbage dump of blurbs YouTube is bunch of very large files on this garbage dump. They too have decreased in quality as Google offers no financial incentive to create high-quality material. In news sites, articles have become and are still becoming a lot shorter, most of them just copy articles from other sites, and yesterday I noticed that Michael West's "independent" journalism has gotten so ridiculous that it's not just a mass repost of AP (AAP). They have not just dupes but triplets of the same articles, i.e. same AP articles posted thrice in the blog, which means it's all automated, no human curation involved. It's like a zombie content farm where one site copies another site, which in turn copies another^**. No wonder there's barely any meaningful news/reporting left. As a side note, motice how "media" almost never mentions WSL anymore. Almost nobody uses it. There's nothing for Microsoft to boast about.

"It's hard to be optimistic about the Web and about journalism on the Web in particular."In any case, excessive reuse of stories means that one just reads the same material over and over again regarding particular subjects. There are no competiting and independent investigations of issues. A free society needs that. It is meanwhile reported that Canada will starve news sites some more ("link tax" just means that there will be even fewer links to articles, reducing traffic some more, keeping users behind walled gardens like Facebook's).

It's hard to be optimistic about the Web and about journalism on the Web in particular. ⬆ _____ ^* Or recycled scandals. This one says "American TikTok Creator Data Is Being Stored In China". On, really? "They've admitted that several times over," an associate says. "Each time it happens the press acts like it's a first-time revelation." Well, because the press has become truly awful.

^** Here's an example of AFP getting reprinted iin Singapore. "Owners of platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter and TikTok would face penalties worth up to 5 per cent of annual global turnover," it says. The original source is only mentioned as the last word in this aricle.