Slopfarms Can Only Survive in Google News, Which is Still Promoting Them
One week ago we ended "Slopwatch". To repeat: "The series called Slopwatch began about a year ago in response to somewhat of a surge in LLM slop and slopfarms in the "Linux" sphere."
Today in RSS feeds we've found no LLM slop about "Linux". Searching for "linux" for Google News, only days before holidays, fared well too. In general, it seems to be "in line" with what some recent studies (and media coverage about these) said: usage of slop is on the decline. Fewer ordinary people bother, many businesses abandon it, and in search of hype the slop pushers now pay the Linux Foundation (they've long paid the media; they still do).
Google News promoted only 3 slopfarms today. It used to be worse. The first was commandlinux.com with fake output like this:
Very obvious slop.
The second was a pair of domains operated by the same person and with similar/overlapping output:
100% slop. Both the images and the text.
Finally, as usual, Google gave visibility to one slopfarm's copycats:
Lots of garbage, but all from the same domain.
It seems increasingly if not extremely unlikely that "Slopwatch" will come back because we simply lack enough examples for something of that scale. Of course we'll still keep abreast of slopfarms, but some days we see none (active) and sometimes only one or few. Some people appreciated with we did in "Slopwatch"; some Serial Sloppers tried not to be named in "Slopwatch", so they changed their ways.
Since Google itself is a slop pusher we don't suppose it'll have an incentive to crack down on the issue. █