Post #982631
2026-02-10 19:38 UTC
Replies (23)
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@bluca@fosstodon.org 2026-02-10 19:51
@corbet
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@withaveeay@mastodon.scot 2026-02-10 19:52
@corbet I suspect it was really written by John Mastodon, not the John Marshall of the byline.
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@trini@floss.social 2026-02-10 19:55
@corbet I don't know, but it feels like the same and potentially quixotic quest all of us trying to draw the line between "this is a tool" and "this is slop" face.
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@jamesderrick@mastodon.social 2026-02-10 19:55
@corbet My subscription to LWN is entirely based on your reputation. Curated, high-quality information, written by technical folks at the heart of Linux / FOSS communities for decades. An island of quality, in a sea of regurgitated slop from stochastic parrots.
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@gezza@mastodon.ie 2026-02-10 20:05
@corbet An established name (such as you already have) helps. The subscriber base is unlikely to flee to return to re-read such fluff. Keeping it relevant and not just a reproduction of e.g. press releases is important. But then lwn has never gone there that I recall. I recall (perhaps incorrectly) linux magazine (or something similar) (horror of horrors, a paper based medium) copying a SuSe press release more or less word for word for their English version, where the German version actually
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@kernellogger@hachyderm.io 2026-02-10 20:06
@corbet sometimes I wonder if we should create a browser extension with a list of websites that do shady stuff like this – which then shows a big fat "you are better than this, don't go there" warning if you accidentally try to open one. That way they would not get revenue von ads, so it might be in the interest of websites to not land on this blocklist. But well, creating that extension and motivating users to install it is quite a bit of work – and maintaining the list is a hell of controversial work. Which is why a concept like this likely won't fly, unless we really really want that to happen.
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@gezza@mastodon.ie 2026-02-10 20:12
@corbet did a useful review. Guess which one I continued to purchase going forward. (They ended up irritating me by pretending I had signed up for auto-renewal, when I needed a pause, but that had nothing to do with the content).
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@tmcfarlane@toot.community 2026-02-10 20:15
@corbet paywall the fuck out of the real content and just publish model poisoning garbage to non logged in accounts. (This clearly won't work, but I've come to believe the web is fucked and that's not a very productive angle)
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@buherator@infosec.place 2026-02-10 20:30
@corbet Blocked and reported to @kagihq SlopStop: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html
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@sandersch@mastodon.online 2026-02-10 20:30
@corbet I think it's an environment we all need to deal with. AI seems to be a way for the uneducated to put more garbage into the interwebs. It's up to the educated to find their way to valuable information and guide the to be educated.
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@gezza@mastodon.ie 2026-02-10 20:31
@corbet Given the question, I have to assume this is happenning. And that lwn is losing either subscribers, or ad revenue from the site/non-subscriber access. For non-renewing subscribers - try asking. You might not like the resposes you get, but there may be a grain of truth to find. For ads, not sure. Maybe there are paths through making it more difficult to access content without ads. That said, my current employer has installed something which breaks https security (dope).
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@JustinDerrick@mstdn.ca 2026-02-10 20:59
@corbet Don't post links to the slop? Post links to your original writing instead?
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@alcinnz@floss.social 2026-02-10 21:16
@corbet Best answer I know of: Find everyone you can doing such work and promote each other. If the web's major institutions are promoting inferior reporting, you'll need all the promotion you can get!
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@larsmb@mastodon.online 2026-02-10 21:33
@corbet Very tough. But such content mills can be reported in some places - e.g., https://blog.kagi.com/slopstop How realistic it is to keep up with the slop? Unclear. But validated "small web" sites (which is another layer Kagi supports) might be a way. Back to curated Internet site lists as if it's the 90s again!
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@meticu@mastodon.social 2026-02-10 22:16
@corbet I did not know what LWN was until today thank you.
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@pchestek@fosstodon.org 2026-02-10 22:21
I dont want to sound Pollyanna-ish, but cream rises. We learned to ignore listcicles, content written for SEO, and other poor quality content. I clock AI in a heartbeat (or human-authored but written like AI, in which case shame on them) and move right past. Not because its bad, just untrustworthy. We don't trust search results anymore because it's so infected. We'll come to a new equilibrium, at least until the next disruptor
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@jmorris@social.kernel.org 2026-02-11 04:31
@corbet "Help us improve our content by reporting any issues you find." lol. no.
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@Anarcat@kolektiva.social 2026-02-11 18:26
@corbet that's going to sound quaint, but the answer, in my mind, is still this old internet we're on right now... #mastodon and the #federation is not exactly "old" but it certainly matches the old school usenet/email models of old, warts and all, but it feels mostly insulated from this madness... search engines are dying because of AI, but we still have, thanks to you, trusted sources of news, and those will stay places we can rely on, not by stumbling on them randomly, but by directly seeking content there, because we know it's there.
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@Anarcat@kolektiva.social 2026-02-11 18:28
@corbet i'll be giving a workshop on "digital sovereignty, federation and mesh networks" and i realized that one of the alternatives to "google" i need to suggest is not only, say, Kagi or Qwant, but mostly Wikipedia and "your public library", because about a large majority of what people search for can be answered by studying there... it's more work than asking a LLM or SEO crap, but it's more reliable, makes you smarter, and it will be more likely to survive peak oil and the AI bubble crash
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@hackillu@mas.to 2026-02-13 22:23
@corbet I got one. We do some sort of trust based network of good work and _human non-AI authors_ and add a search engine to that.
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@hackillu@mas.to 2026-02-13 22:30
@corbet We could have some democratic group, which gets us a human curated list of good websites - not articles, sites - and they take different topics each. Everyone gets a corner, and then we pull some sort of community early yahoo combined with PageRank. DuckDuckGo got a crawler, maybe they would even help out and get us an exclusive corner away from their other results. And we would have every decision go back to a person, so if someone is really iffy - or an AI - we roll back what they did.
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@hackillu@mas.to 2026-02-13 22:31
@corbet Of course we can't have just one person on the subgroup who up and leaves. We should do democratic groups.
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@soaproot@sfba.social 2026-02-11 03:52
@corbet I have almost no idea what would be involved, but if I were in this hypothetical situation I would consider having a business oriented separate, but affiliated, newsletter which is subscriber only and priced for business customers. As far as I can tell that is what @crankyflier.com is doing with https://crankyflier.com/ and https://crankynetworkweekly.com/