The Future of News on the World Wide Web
No "greener pastures" on the Web
Here and elsewhere we have increased focus on Geminispace because we don't deem the Web to be "the future" (for many reasons, most of them predating LLM slop by years). Today's Web is bloated, unlike Geminispace, it's tracked a lot, also unlike Geminispace, and it only seems to be getting worse - to the point where it's only compatible with one "family" of Web browsers (anything based on Chrom*).
Judging by our general reach, even if we had no Web site and there was no World Wide Web (WWW), we'd still be publishing a lot, at least for the Gemini audience (there are text bulletins also).
While Slopwatch has become mostly obsolete (we don't find enough material or slop samples for it anymore; even the Serial Slopper Brian Fagioli is mostly pushing slop about slop), the Web itself isn't recovering. The sites that became inactive or went offline aren't staging a comeback; it's not that slop alone killed them, they just generally lack budget and some of them say that Google's slop disguised as "search" harms their traffic/visibility.
The Web probably "peaked" around 20 years ago. That was when printed "press" (magazines, newspapers etc.) had fully transitioned to an "online era" and still kept many of the same reporters, who published high-quality stories and actually fact-checked [1, 2, 3]. GAFAM's growing dominance and the 'herding' of users online to "social control media" (or "apps") did a lot more damage than slop (see example below). â–ˆ
