Bonum Certa Men Certa

The News Drought Problem

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 25, 2024

Castle by cliffs with green shrubby trees and sea view

"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails." -William Arthur Ward

Drought

THE GNU/Linux (or Free®/libre/freedom-respecting software) world has a NewsDesert™ problem. Yes, "news deserts" are a thing, and it is not limited to any single domain. It's also not the fault of LLMs (plagiarism), except partly.

In our case, "news deserts" can be seen as a blessing in disguise because it means we have a lot less "competition" and we spend less time curating links. It results in more original stories from us. On the other hand, with older news sites such as Groklaw going offline another problem emerges: the Microsofters can allocate more resources to attacking the last remaining Microsoft critics online. The latest threats and blackmail increased in their frequency.

As noted an hour ago, we're doing very well traffic-wise (other sites have had obstacles), but finding news has become harder. Hence, finding topics to cover also got difficult. We're developing some tools this month that analyse RSS feeds to derive from them a topical sub-feed for particular topics, such as BSD. Some of these programs now run on our server.

We always adapt. We've always adapted. That's life. You need to keep on moving. Idleness is a form of slow death.

As a site, we're coding, not just writing. The coding is typically intended to help with the writing (and researching).

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