Video download link | md5sum fbe64d6ddc2a72ccf4301192fbe00152 Web Demise and Effect on People Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: With sites shutting down, media companies going bankrupt, and more sites dabbling in webspam/chatbots we cannot be optimistic about the future of the Web

THE World Wide Web (WWW) is rotting; in 3 posts yesterday [1, 2, 3] we provided examples of the Web turning into trash. In two of these we focused on "Linux" sites. It's not easy to find legitimate articles anymore. The problem of re-posted (under a current date) old posts aside, we see lots of fake 'articles' and sometimes barely articles at all. Some sites became webspam and others went offline, creating another issue (link rot and Web rot). The Web is actually shrinking over time and the golden era of the Web is well past us.

Recently we focused a bit on IBM, the subject which is discussed in the video above. After kicking out Fedora volunteers (slaves) IBM now fires Fedora staff from Red Hat. This is sabotage. We saw several names of people who lost their job at Red Hat, but one name that got more exposure was Ben Cotton, who incidentally decided that signing a defamatory attack letter (calling on the FSF to oust its founder, RMS) would be a good idea. Seems like joining the anti-RMS brigade did not safeguard his job at IBM, but that's another story.

"Some sites became webspam and others went offline, creating another issue (link rot and Web rot)."A few days ago we got confirmation that IBM had laid off people whose job was to run some Red Hat sites.

"So IBM is doing to Fedora etc what Oracle tried to do to MySQL and OpenOffice.org," an associate of ours remarked. "The latter split off a fork and continued as LibreOffice The site / domains under control of IBM are a problem though, they are very valuable and used at this point only to degrade the community." (This alludes to domains such as OpenSource.com)

"Oracle could have taken on and damaged if not beaten Microsoft in the server space with what it bought from Sun," the associate continued. "Instead, it allowed Microsoft to hang on by its fingernails in the server space by killing Sparc and MySQL etc. Now IBM seems to be mopping up part of the FOSS space on behalf of Microsoft."

"Recently we focused a bit on IBM, the subject which is discussed in the video above."So news sites are being shut down, including sites we routinely linked to.

It has meanwhile been noted that CNET staff fights back because CNET is making computer-generated pages. To quote the now-bankrupt VICE: "Around 100 workers have organized in response to the company’s restructuring plans, massive layoffs, and plans for AI content."

That's discussed towards the end of the video above. "Another topic," the associate said, is why "Wikipedia should either allow LLMs to produce articles or to train on articles, or forbid both, but allowing both creates a nasty feedback loop which realizes all kinds of problems."

"The future of the Web isn't bright at all.""Glyn Moody just wrote about that but missed the above concern," the associate added, citing Techdirt.

Wikipedia is fast becoming GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) because of Microsoft, which got caught bribing people to lie in Wikipedia. Well, it's no secret that Wikipedia was already having severe issues with AstroTurfers; expect that to get worse in years to come as human moderators lose patience and throw in the towel. The future of the Web isn't bright at all. It has been getting worse every year for the past decade or so. ⬆