Groklaw Won't be the Latest (Nor the Last) Major Site We Lose
Groklaw lasted about a decade after its last post. As a reminder, Groklaw's Pamela Jones - or PJ - sort of paused (or stopped, then PJ decided to let someone else carry on, a Red Hat person), then carried on herself until 2013. The site began having various uptime and availability issues around 2020, last year it was becoming difficult to access, and earlier this year it was taken over by scammers. The original is still accessible as a static archive in ibiblio.org (e.g. Microsoft Litigation), but almost nobody will know these Web addresses.
The Web is being ruined; some of the ruin seems deliberate, set aside the slopfarms and Mozilla's foolishness (Mozilla newfound love of slop has turned away or put off many volunteers*, not to mention longtime users).
When the chatbot (based on LLMs) hype started we probably belittled or underestimated somewhat how much harm this hype would do to the Web. We assumed many people would recognise it was a passing fad that can merely destroy sites (ubuntupit.com seems to have recognised this; it stopped 10 days ago) by tarnishing their reputation and betraying readers.
By the time Groklaw was having severe issues we are guessing it was already being hammered by LLM bots. It was merely exploited like some "training set" - basically a blood-sucking exercise.
The fate of Groklaw won't be unique to Groklaw. Many other sites will go offline; the more popular among those will get hijacked by rogue actors. █
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* See "AI Controversy Forces End of Mozilla’s Japanese SUMO Community" or this original post:
Hi, I am a locale leader of SUMO Japanese community. I have contributed to the Support over 20 years, before the beginning of support.mozilla.org.
Today, November 4, we decided to end our SUMO Japanese community.
In October 22, the sumobot was introduced to Japanese KB articles. I cannot accept its behavior and no words.
- It doesn't follow our translation guidelines.
- It doesn't respect current localization for Japanese users, so they were lost.
- It approves its direct English MT immediately for All archived KB articles.
- It approves only in 72 hours after its updates, so we lost our work to train new contributors.
- It has been working now without our acceptance, without controls, without communications.
- Over 300 Knowledge Base articles are overridden by sumobot.
They are all happened on the product server, not on staging server. I understand that this is mass destruction of our work and explicit violation to the Mozilla mission, allowed officially.
Therefore, I (marsf) declare:
- I quit to contribute to support.mozilla.org.
- I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs.
- I request to remove all my translation from learned data of SUMO AIs.
However, individual Japanese contributors may want to work in their responsibility. It is their choice, we don't care nor support.
Bye.
Also see "Firefox's Mozilla disbands Japanese translation community as it introduces machine translation". Some of the coverage about this seems to be slop! That too says a lot about the state of the Web.