The Issue Isn't the Internet, the Issue is How People Are Taught to Use or Misuse It
The Internet (or Net) is very old. It's a lot older than most people care to realise because to a lot of people in the world the Internet didn't exist until they got some spyphone (skinnerbox) running Symbian or Android. To many others, there's no concept of what the Internet is and to some people it means "the browser" or "the Web" or some "app". To many folks in "third-world" countries, Facebook is the Internet (nope, not some ISP that offered dial-up connection). To me, the Internet is many text files. Some come from Gopher, some come from Gemini Protocol, and many comes from RSS feeds. I read 'the Internet' in Kate, the default KDE text editor.
This new article promotes a misconception about the Internet. An associate explains that the story here is that people conflate The Internet with social control media, or even just a handful of web services. (With small "w")
This is becoming a real problem for major newspapers. They are led to believe that in order to remain relevant they need to make some "app" for an "app store" (censorship machines, monopolies that control speech) and moreover outsource a lot of their journalistic activities to third parties controlled by actual Nazis and other extremists. They shoot their own foot and burn their own platform.
In recent months many news sites complained that they lost a lot of "traffic" or "audiences" (their terms of choice) because Google provided LLM slop to searchers, always at the expense of actual sites that the slop was based upon. Therein lies another mistake: depending on third parties for search. It's not just that search is getting worse. Search is getting slop. Google experiments with serving slop instead of traditional SERPs. And you know what? For Web search, in 2025, a lot of actual results you get in Google aren't real sites but slopfarms. Even Google News is becoming like that. If you ran a search for "linux" in Google News 2 hours ago, this is what you'd get: (a pair of slopfarms promoted by Google News)
Fake article with slop image (plagiarism). Same as this:
Google News is promoting both, along with more LLM slop from the noise machine, BetaNoise.
Search Google (traditional search) for "linux" and you'll get key topics covered by bottom-feeding LLM slop such as this:
It's LLM slop, not a real article. Yesterday we caught new slop in Planet Ubuntu. It's awful. They don't seem to curate away the bots!
The Web has been ruined by slopfarms and GAFAM companies; they're choosing to push slop and participate in the problem by providing slop (plagiarism) tools. Facebook went as far as gloating it would create slop accounts to feed real users with slop.
The Web is circling down the drain. The Internet is not.
Believe in the Net, not the Web. For now, E-mail isn't drowning in slop (spam is a related issue, which can be handled differently). Many other protocols remain mostly unadulterated. █