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Summary: With webspam, chaff, sponsored puff pieces and worse things being presented as "the news" we're running out of actual purpose for the World Wide Web

THE recurring theme of the World Wide Web slowly and gradually 'dying' is important because the media itself -- or what's left of it on the World Wide Web -- isn't talking about it. This is misframed as all sorts of other problems.

When sites that used to produce technical news are like 80% spam (Tom's Hardware for instance) or paid placements (we keep giving examples from MIT Technology Review) it's hard to blame Web users for not visiting these anymore. It's like they publish for bots (or SEO), not for human beings.

"Our expectation is that 5 years from now there will be little actual news left on the Web."The video above also discusses the situation with Linux.com and OpenSource.com. One might imagine those domains, which go back decades (Linux.com was active in the 1990s), would still be going strong. But that's not happening.

Our expectation is that 5 years from now there will be little actual news left on the Web. Journalists being replaced with chatbots isn't what will happen; people won't bother reading a salad of words or 'spew' (it's easy to detect such dross, as Richard Stallman noted in his talk earlier this week). What might happen is, people will explore alternatives. Social control media is waning, so that's not it. What will it be? Watch the video above. ⬆