19 Years in Numbers: Techrights' Anniversary Countdown and Retrospective
Everything was moved to the UK two years ago
The Web site (and now Gemini capsule) of Techrights turns 19 in just over a fortnight. Earlier today I bought a large pack of balloons to celebrate this occasion, along with all sorts of other items for our small (modest) party.
Techrights.org was registered in 2010 (along with Techrights.com, as suggested to us by David Gerard because he foresaw hijacking attempts), but the site actually started in 2006 when I was finishing my Ph.D. thesis and had spare time to write - and generally mess about - in USENET, Digg.com, and various other online "platforms".
In the first year of the site there were not many blog posts, only a few per day. It was a new site, barely known to anybody. Digg.com, where I was once ranked 17th, helped increase visibility/exposure. Many people were very angry about what Microsoft and Novell had done, so they followed our analysis. Many left comments and some people sent tips. Later on we got some whistleblowers as well. We had high-impact exclusives. In 2008 we thrived in Freenode (IRC) and some people I knew from USENET joined in. They were happy to help; one of them even became our webhost and he's still in IRC right now (almost two decades later). GNU/Linux has become a lot more mainstream since then.
By 2010 the number of daily blog posts increased to about 10 (on average). It peaked at around 29 or 31 (I forgot which) on a Sunday that year. We used WordPress and MediaWiki. The workflow was mostly OK, Daily Links took a lot longer to prepare (curate), and news on the Web was still abundant. Traffic-wise, the site did well enough to compel me to spend on it many hours (over 80 hours per week), then work 'on the side' to cover basic bills.
In 2019 we began improving our workflows and, accordingly/predictably, we became a lot more productive (this past week we've published about 150 pages). We could focus more on research and writing, less on technical niggles and 'mechanical' work. Not too long afterwards we began sharing our tools over git:// and during the pandemic we added support for several more protocols, then experimented a lot with video (which we'll probably come back to one day; there's considerable overhead associated with preparing equipment).
Traffic in Techrights continues to improve and the growth isn't due to LLM bots, there are many legitimate ("organic") requests in gemini://, https://, and http:// (we support all three, https:// has some real problems).
When we turn 20 we hope to have already managed to cull LLM nuisance. Sometimes we mistakenly link to slop articles in Daily Links. We try to blacklist offending domains, but it is a "moving target"; Google isn't keeping up, it actively helps sites become slopfarms (it's selling its own LLM tools). Some "planets" fail to recognise that blogs they syndicate quietly turned into slopfarms.
Numbers aren't everything, impact is.
They say that if you want a lot of traffic, then sell sex (which is what a dying scam of Scam Altman resorts to now).
We don't expect that the LLM bubble will be around for much longer. It's hard to say when it will unofficially 'pop' and it doesn't really matter. That's going to impact very dumb companies (relics) like IBM and GAFAM. The rest of us will just cruise along.
As for Social Control Media, its "masters" recognise that a growing proportion of their "engagement" is fake (bots). They're hesitant or reluctant to do something about it (like culling the bots) as it would crash their "traffic" and perceived "market value". The longer they wait, the worse it'll get. The bots will outnumber real users, edging them out.
Of course we don't have those sorts of issues because we reject slop and Social Control Media, instead focusing on what actually matters. We're also extremely robust to censorship. █