There's Still Hope for the World Wide Web
Reasons for optimism
Today in IRC there's some discussion about slop. People are generally unwilling to read slop and they don't fancy slop images, either. Once they discover that a site they read has slop images they may also suspect that the text is slop. It often works like that; for instance, Linux Journal experimented with slop images before it turned "full slop", including for text. Now there's no reason to visit that site anymore.
The image on the right is a new fake 'article', attributed to an author that probably does not even exist (we've long argued they likely use pseudonyms to make it seem like their slop machine had real people behind it). The image is slop, as usual, and the 'article' is 100% slop. There may be a grain of truth to it, but it is sloppily done plagiarism.
BetaNews experimented with becoming a slopfarm and had regrets. It brought back real writers, except the Serial Slopper, which it now bans as "spam".
I myself lost interest in Web search because very often it leads to fake sites. I showed my wife this past Sunday how when I search for very obvious things (like whether pigeons like rice or it's a myth that it harms their gut) Google will just try to sell me things and direct me to fake sites. This is bad use of time and it exposes people to misinformation.
We are guessing that over time more people will stick to trusted sites and not "take the plunge" in a Web increasingly poisoned by spam and slop with fine SEO.
Does that mean fewer people will bother with search engines? Hopefully.
A lot of the mindless, shallow "media" (parrots) frame it as a balance between chatbots and search, as if nothing exists except those two things. False dichotomy basically. Set aside RSS feeds and social control media, many people read the Web by going to sites they trust and like (at least as starting points). In the 1990s, before search engines "matured", many people browsed the Web that way.
As it turns out, analognowhere does some full comic strips ("How Hard Could It Be?") too. It does not link to any other site and it can provide hours of entertainment for geeks.
Let's hope that the trajectory of the Web won't be leading us to over-reliance on Google, nor will it reward worthless slopfarms.
There's a better way to use the Web; one of the worst possible ways is social control media, which is of course neither social nor media. It's just a waste of time. █