Slow News Cycles Are Part of a Trend, Technology Gravitating Towards Rich People's Interests
Earlier this year: The Fall of Corporate Media Controlled by Oligarchs Who Boost (or Are Compelled to Boost) Reckless Lies About the Poor While Normalising Rich People's Crimes
This month is 'halfway done'. We're approaching the "official" first day of spring and some time soon we'll begin the new "Chapter" about the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
Since moving to the new system (SSG), which we had built in 2022, 8560 pages were added and we've therefore published close to 20 per day in 2025. The number of pages is less important (almost meaningless) than the exclusivity or the magnitude of impact. We focus not on the number of words (verbosity can be dealt with by useless bots) but accuracy and clarity.
In internal discussions lately (the past 5 days or so) we entertained the possibility that news on the Web was dying due to clickbait, SEO, LLM slop (slopfarms), spam, scams, and offline sites. Many factors contributed towards last week being an exceptionally slow news week, even before the US government fired another shot at the press. It's not clear if we're witnessing a sort of "end of days" for media online; it's already getting hard to find any coverage at all about particular events, incidents, announcements and so on (or all one can find is slop/spam).
This issue isn't limited to the Web.
Many things that used to be simple are becoming more difficult and less reliable (to the users). That's because many things and perhaps most of today's stuff gets built to serve the interests of the builders or the business interests of some company, which need not satisfy the customer.
A couple of years ago we said we'd try to contribute towards solutions by producing more articles, not just relying on others doing so (then linking to them). Similarly, there are some ambitious projects out there seeking to make programs or hardware actually designed to serve users and be adaptable in the sense that the user can change it.
Not everything needs to necessarily get worse over time. █
