Slopwatch: GNU/Linux Sites That Became Slopfarms and Spamfarms
This weekend's last Slopwatch starts with noobslab.com.
To be clear, this site used to be legitimate. It used to have decent articles about GNU/Linux. In more recent years, prior to Slopwatch, we began moaning about what it had become. It had a bunch of spam, just like UNIXMen, LinuxBSDos.com, or LinuxTechLab [1, 2, 3].
Linux Journal and others became slopfarms. LinuxInsider experimented very briefly, then stopped. Any lessons here?
Watch what noobslab.com has just trotted out there:
Along with this linkspam
These may or may not be LLM slop, but it's darn obvious they're linkspam. And it's not unprecedented for this site.
In an actual slopfarm, linuxsecurity.com, they now resort to pseudonyms:
And Google News has just promoted Phoronix ripoffs from a notorious slopfarm:
Fake images, fake authors, plagiarised text.
Meanwhile, over at UbuntuPIT, they carry on taking real articles such as this one, turning them into slop or words soup:
Same for this:
This is the "training set".
The Web is a mess and "Linux" or "Ubuntu" sites became part of the problem. Not all, but some... █