Video download link | md5sum 48a5d064885c5dd7041807fd4336708b Dealing With Scarcity of News Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: For a number of years in our Git forge we've developed Free software tools to help identify and study news online; the problem is that over time there's less and less of it left online (old material goes offline and almost nothing replaces it except chaff)

THE sheer bloat of Web pages is one prominent issue, but what about signal-to-noise ratio? What about gossip instead (or in place) of "news"? What about so-called 'news deserts' or 'skeleton crews' pretending to produce news but instead spewing political propaganda, sometimes with machine-generated text? What about SEO, clickbait, and "tweets" presented as news? As Ryan puts it in IRC today, "the news is under pressure to sell "hits" and make it seem like things are happening all the time."

"There's a mostly unspoken-about crisis and it involves the rotting of the Web. We can see some symptoms of it, such as the demise of social control networks."Each week or each month -- not just every year -- we can easily spot further reduction in news on the Web. This isn't limited to news sites; blogs are the same. This doesn't affect just BSD- and GNU/Linux-centric writers. It doesn't affect just technology. It doesn't affect just English language sites. It's universal.

A few years ago we started developing software tools to help us do Daily Links. This investment of time always paid off and nowadays we're able to find all sorts of news of interest, including tips about Microsoft layoffs (not typically covered by the media but instead covered up or drowned out of view).

There's a mostly unspoken-about crisis and it involves the rotting of the Web. We can see some symptoms of it, such as the demise of social control networks. ⬆