Techrights

Something Has Gone Very Wrong at iTWire

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 17, 2024,

updated Sep 17, 2024

Everything comes to an end, eventually

iTWire was never an excellent site, to put it mildly and politely (or putting it borderline sarcastically). However, few of its contributors (or "authors" in a "B2B" world, not 'professional journalists') covered GNU/Linux, notably David and Sam about 1.5 decades ago. Sam was still around 3 months ago, but when Julian Assange had come back to Australia (Sam routinely wrote about the Assange case) he sort of vanished so suddenly, after writing quite prolifically for a number of years. Here is what it looks like now:

Nothing since June.

Sam Varghese participated in the online mob against RMS some years ago, but then he sort of stopped that. In more recent years he published what seemed like obligatory (by the employer) spam, including "reviews" that were basically marketing. Maybe there were "quotas" for such "placements". Either way, those damaged his integrity as a journalist. To his credit, Jack Wallen stopped doing this some months ago after we had repeatedly called him out on it, salvaging his reputation and credibility for now.

It's hard to merely guess what exactly goes on there at iTWire (it's not a public company), but budget/staff cuts are possible, or perhaps merely a transition to corporate spam. We saw several highly dubious Microsoft pieces and attack pieces on Free software there lately (mentioned only in IRC; here's an example from this month). This week there's this Windows spam, as an associate calls it, adding: "best bet against cyber attacks remains FOSS systems" (rather than "Your best bet against cyber attacks? Timely threat intelligence").

So we've decided to mention what happened to iTWire, despite not knowing the internal 'politics' and finances of iTWire.

This is just a word of caution.

"iTWire has descended into marketing spam," the associate says. "Perhaps soon even it will peddle slop." (LLM output, a.k.a. "bullshit generator")

As noted at the start, iTWire was never a great site. Stan Beer and others tried to give an Australian perspective and it wasn't clear if this would also become financially viable. In the days of Digg.com, prior to social control media craze, iTWire seemed to be doing OK, whereas these days it feels rather marginal or 'niche'. Sometimes the site is functionally broken because they use ancient Joomla (they hide the version number), piling up lots of technical debt along the way.

A couple of months ago iTWire ceased its activity in Twitter/X, which it had joined in April 2009, i.e. more than 15 years ago. Are they entering the 'monetise and exit' (yard sale) phase? █