Bonum Certa Men Certa

Reading News on the Web Without Curation and Cruft-Reducing Tools Will Become Harder

Video download link | md5sum 48a5d064885c5dd7041807fd4336708b Dealing With Scarcity of News Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: For a number of years in our Git forge we've developed Free software tools to help identify and study news online; the problem is that over time there's less and less of it left online (old material goes offline and almost nothing replaces it except chaff)

THE sheer bloat of Web pages is one prominent issue, but what about signal-to-noise ratio? What about gossip instead (or in place) of "news"? What about so-called 'news deserts' or 'skeleton crews' pretending to produce news but instead spewing political propaganda, sometimes with machine-generated text? What about SEO, clickbait, and "tweets" presented as news? As Ryan puts it in IRC today, "the news is under pressure to sell "hits" and make it seem like things are happening all the time."

"There's a mostly unspoken-about crisis and it involves the rotting of the Web. We can see some symptoms of it, such as the demise of social control networks."Each week or each month -- not just every year -- we can easily spot further reduction in news on the Web. This isn't limited to news sites; blogs are the same. This doesn't affect just BSD- and GNU/Linux-centric writers. It doesn't affect just technology. It doesn't affect just English language sites. It's universal.

A few years ago we started developing software tools to help us do Daily Links. This investment of time always paid off and nowadays we're able to find all sorts of news of interest, including tips about Microsoft layoffs (not typically covered by the media but instead covered up or drowned out of view).

There's a mostly unspoken-about crisis and it involves the rotting of the Web. We can see some symptoms of it, such as the demise of social control networks.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Slopfarms Slopping Away at "Linux" and Spreading Microsoft Misinformation
Slopfarms don't comprehend this as they lack actual comprehension, they're just parrots
GitHub the Company Has, in Effect, Just Died (Time to Look for Alternatives)
To Microsoft, what's left of GitHub after dismantling/folding it is some "training set" (people's code, without permission to "train" i.e. misuse under the guise of "GenAI" plagiarism)
Linux Foundation Says "Housekeeping", "Hung", "Normal", "Native Feature/Support" and "Girl/Girls" Are Offensive Words
Bombing people is OK, just use the right "terms"
It Looks More Like Microsoft GitHub Layoffs
GitHub is just losing loads of money
 
Links 12/08/2025: WinRAR Zero-Day, SonicWall Does More Harm Than Good
Links for the day
Links 12/08/2025: More Sabotage of Underwater Cable Ahead of Russian Alaska Summit
Links for the day
Richard Stallman Will Not Miss Microsoft GitHub, It Was Only Good at Harvesting a Lot of Code for Plagiarism-as-a-Service
investors are apparently willing to lose money for buzzwords
Links 12/08/2025: Science, Hardware, and Ukraine Excluded From Negotiations About Its Future
Links for the day
Gemini Links 12/08/2025: Meditation, OpenStreetMap, Smolweb, and More
Links for the day
Google News is Dying: Most of Its Top Stories Now Are LLM Slop With Slop Images (i.e. 100% Fake 'Content')
Google News has been drowning in this sort of stuff for quite some time
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, August 11, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, August 11, 2025
Our Predictions Were Right: GitHub Dying as Losses Pile Up (as a Company It Cannot Continue to Exist, It's Not 'Free Hosting')
GitHub always lost money
Links 11/08/2025: Meritless Twitter Suspensions and Disney Scraps Deepfake Dwayne Johnson
Links for the day
Gemini Links 11/08/2025: Upgrading Debian Bookworm and Better Quality PDFs From Gemini Pages
Links for the day
Currys PCWorld Lied a Decade Ago, 10 Years Later It Still Effectively Voids Your Warranty for Installing GNU/Linux Despite It Being Increasingly Mainstream
Microsoft gatekeepers
Team GNOME Has Libeled Me for Nearly 20 Years
we are not dealing with sane people
Experience With Airlines in 'Web Sites' and in 'Apps'
In a lot of ways, Stallman Was Right about what JavaScript would turn out to be
Open Does Not Mean Free
wiser to ask if some program is freedom-respecting
The Register MS Takes Money From Companies Banned by the Biden and Trump Administrations (National Security Risk)
today's sponsor
Sabotaging GNU/Linux PCs (and Users) is Not a 'Joke'
maybe cruelty is the very objective
How We Process Screenshots of Slop to Suitably Tag Them as Slop
everything is a single command
Links 11/08/2025: Data Breaches, Politics, and Climate
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, August 10, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, August 10, 2025
Gemini Links 11/08/2025: Tea Caffeine Hot and Super ZZ Zero
Links for the day
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, Brian Fagioli, and Other Serial Sloppers
Maybe Microsoft wants to dub this "Web5"
Gemini Links 10/08/2025: Residents Management Company, Automation, and Politics
Links for the day
Links 10/08/2025: AOL Ending Dial-up
Links for the day
Seductive Mirage or Allure of Complex, Proprietary Coffee Machines (or Similar White Elephants)
Software is a lot like those things
Links 10/08/2025: Webrings, “AI Sunglasses” and “AI Eyeglasses”, US Administration Intensifies Attacks on Science and Research
Links for the day
Sometimes Newer is Worse
We generally need to reject this dumb notion that "old" means bad
The Code Used to Make Techrights Fits on a Seventh of a Floppy Disk (or 100KB When Compressed)
For the sake of comparison I've just downloaded the latest version of WordPress. The ZIP file is 27.2MB in size, or ~27,200KB.
What They Tell Young Programmers
Coding in 2025
Simpler is Better When Simple is Enough
Over-complicating things to "sell" new versions is so 1990s
Links 10/08/2025: From Social Control Media to Prison, New Examples of Windows TCO
Links for the day
Sloppy Reporting About Slop, or How The Register MS Lowers Its Standards
Maybe the management isn't even aware of this
IBM's Strategy: Cull 'Expensive' Workers, Replace Them With Cheaper Ones
So far we saw not even one rebuttal or challenge to the claim of Red Hat layoffs scheduled for tomorrow
If You Attack Somebody Too Much You Legitimise and Strengthen That Somebody
at the end those attacks add up to a "martyr" status
The Man Who Helped Microsoft Kill Linux is Trying to Delay Our Lawsuits Against Him
By conservative estimates, and based on court documents submitted by them, they're prepared to spend over a million dollars on lawyers, fighting against me and my wife
Gemini Links 10/08/2025: Gen Con 2025 and Framework Laptop
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 09, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, August 09, 2025