As The Web Gets Drowned Out, Sinking in a Pool of LLM Slop, Real News Sites With Real News Become Increasingly Rare If Not Extinct
It also makes the general public less informed, uninformed, or mis-informed
There are dozens of new comments today (a Sunday) about IBM layoffs, but hearsay about the layoffs or rumours already substantiated are rarely covered by the mainstream media. It's even ignoring thousands of layoffs at IBM as if those never happened. They did happen (earlier this month), but if nobody reads about that in the media, then does that "count"? Will shareholders of IBM even know?
Here in this site an associate explains that there are a lot of layoffs and "mostly it is the small handful of key sites in India of all places which cover them. However, since they tend to get that news via wire feeds, the Western sites could have covered the layoffs but simply choose not to again and again and again".
This is a real problem. But it is also an opportunity for sites that do attempt to still cover the news. Sure, it can make them SLAPP targets (if only few cover some topic, SLAPP becomes cheaper). But will such coverage be visible at all?
The Web being filled (up) with LLM slop means that the incentive to cover real news is decreasing. Here's an example of a fake 'article' (slop) about "Linux". This was a day ago:
Nobody wrote this, it's not factual, and it is FUD.
Get well soon, World Wide Web. Why does Google News still uprank this? Why is Google trying to replace search with its own slop? Who or what stands to benefit? The fake "Gemini"? █