Culling Bad RSS Feeds of Bad Sites
Not throwing the baby out with the bathwater
This would hardly be our first rant about the Web and the shape of many former "news sites". No, it's not like we're collectively bashing all news sites, we're talking about sites which exploit their former reputation to do something else altogether, e.g. "Business Insider" or "Quartz" (which became slop).
Many sites that used to be more or less OK have gone rogue - to the point of promoting scams, spam, etc. Some became slopfarms. We've named some of them but not all. We also showed what happened to them. Some were former "Linux" sites.
Now that the sister site (it turned 21 today; it has curated Linux news since 2004 and has many original articles, so later today we'll celebrate) finds many "Linux" sites which are rogue the "Slopwatch" series that we periodically do here seems more essential. We must adapt. We need to do something about many sites spewing out garbage about "Linux" or - as in the case of BetaNews - particular sites ripping off other sites. What they do lessens the incentive for real journalists to carry on. So this is dangerous.
"I'm dropping Modern Diplomacy from OPML," a friend told me some hours ago, as "the site itself is passible, but the feed is fully compromised and fille *only* with spam and scams. I've tried contacting them via their contact info but have heard nothing back".
"Yeah," another friend told me, "nothing changed over the years, and AI is now making it worse and easier for them to steal content. Personally, I have blocked AI from my website so they can't use it to rewrite my articles with, let's say, ChatGPT. And now there's also the [person] from Linuxiac who writes everything that I write (same apps, same distros, same subjects, etc.) with pretty much the same headlines... absolutely disgusting."
"Keep up the good work," I told him.
Like I said here several times in the past, my wife keeps complaining that writers ought to speak out about the ripoff artists, the LLM slop etc. They're way too quiet about it. They must raise awareness of this problem. Even as recently as hours ago she was scanning some sites to see if their text was authentic. She does not want to reward (with links, hence traffic) the cheaters and BS artists. █