The Slopfarms' Self Detonation
Yesterday we wrote about BetaNews. Its last pinned "tweet": (in spite of it blocking us)
Is that a clue? Did they decide to shut down?
If so, why revert back to a backup or site state from a week earlier? Did they get cracked? Outdated static archive?
Either way, this may be a cautionary tale to sites which resort to LLM slop. Sooner or later readers realise they read junk from chatbots. They jog on.
Will this site make a comeback? Time will tell.
We've meanwhile noticed the slopfarm Linuxsecurity using some more spam about "Open-Source". This is LLM slop:
Slop about "Linux":
Then slop about "Fingwit" in relation to "Linux":
These are not real articles. They just game search engines, which rapidly become useless. It's SEO. They try to show up in Google and then serve a mindless soup of words, based on the work on other people.
Even Google News is polluted. Yesterday, if one searched it for "Linux", it would link so this slopfarm:
It's a fake article. Both the text and the image are slop.
And Google News also linked to its sister slopfarm: (same people operating both sites)
Google News and Google Search are both polluted by LLM slop. Google itself helps people work on making slop, so Google lacks an incentive to fix that.
If more sites like BetaNews go under, then maybe we can still salvage some of the Web. █