Slopfarms Marginalised, Some Suspend Operations
There's still some slop disguised as news, but it's made less visible as it's seen as undesirable
Today we saw no slopfarms in Google News (the more Linux-centric search terms), so that's rather good. Outside of that index we saw a pair of slop pieces in ubuntupit.com ("Linux Kernel 6.6.133 Released With Urgent Fixes, Users Advised to Update" and "NetBSD 11.0 RC3 Released With RISC-V Support and Performance Improvements"), one in linuxsecurity.com ("CUPS Exploit Chain Still Reaches Root Access, Despite 2024 Fixes" and two in linuxteck.com ("The Brave Stance Zorin OS Just Took Against Age Verification" and "The Best Linux Filesystem for Your Production Server in 2026"). linuxbuz.com also spewed out some slop, but we became accustomed to it and those things stay below the radar, barely visible to searchers.
Associated Press and new management at Wall Street Journal (News Corp.) experiment with slop now, but it's always doomed to fail, just like at BuzzFeed. Sites typically resort to this when they're failing anyway; moving to slop doesn't save them, it hastens their irrelevance and demise. Their credibility falls rather fast.
The Serial Slopper has not touched Linux-related topics in over a week, so that's a good sign.
A lot of the issues are with the Web itself, not just slop; some people who become lazy and prompt LLMs are just signalling that they throw in the towel. █