Audience Growing in Spite of the Deluge of Webslop
We probably benefit from the rejection of LLM slop
Attempts to muzzle us (deplatform etc.) go a long way back and did not succeed, they arguably made us more popular than before.
My personal blog sees a resurgence and this past week we saw record traffic in Geminispace, with over a million requests across capsules (Techrights exceeding by a factor of 3-4 the sister site, tuxmachines.org; it used to be an order of magnitude apart).
As we said some weeks ago, we expect November to be mostly uneventful, leaving us with a lot more time indoors, researching and writing. It's a team effort and our team grows as a function of attempts to censor us.
LLM slop is not "competition" to us.
(news.)tuxmachines.org is getting better at 1) culling slopfarms (even the "famous" ones like linuxiac.com) 2) clustering related stories. Linus Torvalds has taken note. He reads that site.
As for Techrights, when your site has a decent search facility that people can use and can trust (and does not spew out unreliable slop), then you have no "competition" in results, as all results are local. We plan to deploy something similar for (news.)tuxmachines.org after our 20th anniversary. These are big projects.
By not relying on GAFAM, we'll assure we're in better control of our destiny. No "optimising for Google" or any of that other nonsense. See this new report entitled "Google may buy publishers time they should use it to loosen tech giants grip on them. It says "Google will likely remain an important source of traffic for years - what publishers should do in the meantime."
They spent a lot of resources on "SEO" and/or outsourcing themselves to social control media. Giant mistake! █