State of the Slop, Linux Edition
It's now September, so a third of the year is left and at the start of the year we said we hoped slopfarms would be marginalised, with some delisted/deranked, some becoming inactive, many going offline.
Having just noticed that freenode.net became a slopfarm, we're not too worried. It was dead/dying already; it's normal for pointless sites to "dabble in" slop. For them, it's typically a case of, "what's left to lose anyway???"
We saw this trajectory in linuxjournal.com and various other domains with "linux" in their name. They became inactive, then they thought, "hey! Let's see what happens if we push some botspam into the WWW and RSS feeds!"
In a nutshell, LLM slop is often just a hallmark of dying/dead sites. People who care and value their work (and reputation) will never turn to slop for anything.
Whether slop about "linux" becomes rarer by the end of this year, well... time will tell. 4 more months. █