Why Slop Will Flop - Part II - Devil in the Details
Earlier this afternoon we started this new series about slop, carefully if not optimistically noting a notable reduction in slop use for news sites.
It's not dramatic enough a fall to say "slop is dead", but it seems to be heading in that direction. These were yesterday [1, 2]:
We've been keeping track of Linuxiac since we caught it pushing slop as news. A lot of recent articles appear to be (and also accordingly determined as such) "massaged" slop, i.e. the starting point is slop as "autocomplete on steroids". Bobby Borisov is taking "shortcuts" by prompting LLMs for "novel plagiarism".
This means that for the time being neither this site nor the sister site will link to anything (reading headlines is another) in Linuxiac. It would be unfair to still call it a "slopfarm" (at one point about 100% of it was slop), but people ought to understand this "Devil in the Details"... once people get caught entertaining slop they either lose their audience or lose their job (the latter means both).
The safest thing to do is to identify the "devils" and follow them around, e.g. Fagioli getting the boot and starting his own slopfarm. Nowadays he's pushing slop into Digg [1, 2].
News sites or social control media sites which tolerate slop are digging their own grave. â–ˆ
Image source: Still Life with Rayfish