Just How Slow Has the News Industry Become?
We're drowning in garbage from fake publishers
NEWS sites are dying all the time. It's hardly a secret that far more news sites die than emerge out of nothing, anew. For many, new ones in particular, being noticed means establishing some presence in social control media, which is itself waning (it also censors news/accounts/topics to maximise "engagement"). Not being noticed (or read) means a lack of incentive to produce, to write, to try to spread the word (to only a few "followers" in some dying platform owned by a Trump-boosting bigot).
Well, of course the way to go is RSS feeds. Even if not many people use these (anymore; Mozilla started discouraging their use), it's a lot better than nothing. Don't rely on Google searches or the voodoo art of "SEO" because Google tries to keep people on its SERPs (search engine results pages), just like Facebook wants everything to be posted to and everybody to stay glued to "timelines" curated by (or for) oligarchy. Google tries to give people "answers" or snippets instead of sending visitors to the sites that actually did all the work. This lessens the incentive to make properly-researched new material. It also demonetises platforms other than GAFAM. In YouTube, channels can get banned for making their own ads.
From what we can gather, BetaNews is a dead site now. It is practically dead and it's not news (it is clickbait and product spam). It's trying to hide its death using LLM slop and spam as "filler". See what we published yesterday and today: BetaNews Has Become a SPAM/Slop Factory, Brian Fagioli Publishes Fake 'Articles' | It's Morbid to Talk About Living People as If They're Dead | BetaNews, Inc. Became a Spam Operation/Web Site, LLM Spew (Slop) for SEO Disguised as "Articles" | BetaNews is Beta-Testing the Site as LLM Slop With Microsoft Propaganda Thrown In | Even the Managing Editor of BetaNews is Doing Slop and Spam
If that's not bad enough, 1-2 weeks ago we noticed a very sharp decrease in news volume. We don't know why. It could not be blamed on holidays. Last night I cautioned an associate that Straits Times (Singapore) now reposts lots of other sites' material instead producing originals and English-speaking Indian "news" (as in "media") sites post the same stories with different headlines for the merely appearance of uniqueness. It may seem like they produce a lot of articles, but they just post the same articles across many sites and sometimes they just license (to repost) material from remaining American (or British) publishers.
News became so slow that news-finding tasks I used to do late in the weekends (Sundays) I was able to start on Saturday. Then it became Friday (before the weekend), then Thursday, and nowadays it's Wednesday. Today it was Wednesday morning (1AM). So weekend tasks have been pushed back to the start of Wednesday. That's how desperate I became for news. That's not even GNU/Linux or BSD news; it's general news. The Free software feeds I can finish within a few hours every day. Over a decade ago it was a day-long activity because there were so many "Linux blogs" and even the tech press (which existed back then) occasionally wrote about "Linux" or "Ubuntu".
Society is - in general - moving in a bad direction*. There are wars, deaths in the UK rose by over 10% (since the pandemic started; the excess deaths aren't slowing down), many companies perish, and even the flow of information through the press has become a trickle and a lot of it is fake, lies, and/or generated by a computer to give a false impression of information.
Perhaps that's just what we deserve. █
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* The man we sued in September (he had long harassed my wife and I) publicly boasts that he drank 29 cheap beers, so his life goes very well right now... apparently this has become more normal where he lives.