Notfox.com                                                    06/30/23
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In 2012,  I started a  website called  tiltish, intending to  create a
platform  for individuals  to rate  /  score news  articles (how  they
"tilt"  on the  political  spectrum), and  discuss  their contents.  I
thought it might be an interesting  way to identify media bias. It was
a great opportunity to wrap my head around ajax and a lot of other web
programming concepts,  and it fed  the interest I  had at the  time in
general news media.

Through the  development and  beta-testing cycles  of that  project, I
very quickly came to realize something:  all of the news media outlets
were  biased, and  in the  same ways.  In fact,  they functioned  as a
collective would, and not as individual outlets should.

By the time  the tiltish platform was complete and  functional, I shut
it down in  disgust. There was nothing redeemable  about the so-called
news, in my mind at the time.

Around  2015,  I  decided  to  attempt  to  highlight  the  collective
deception of the news media, and a site called notfox.com was born. It
had  a simple  goal:  demonstrate that  the  mainstream media  outlets
operated  in lock-step.  Or, otherwise  viewed, shine  a light  on the
established ideas surrounding agenda-setting theory.

Recently, I  decided that notfox.com  was no longer meaningful  to me,
and I  shut it down. In  all honesty, it  had only a handful  of users
that I was aware  of, and it was a sore spot. I  turned it off and put
the domain up for sale.

Yesterday, I got a  notice that the domain was going  to expire, and I
needed to make a decision. I  had done some searching while the domain
was for sale,  to see if I  could find any potential  buyers who could
use the  domain. Ultimately,  after running  it for  so many  years, I
decided that I wasn't ready to let it go yet.

Today, notfox.com  is back  online. I've added  some things  that will
hopefully offend everyone:  first, I added Newsmax into  the mix. It's
just as  idiotic as the  rest of  them, and I  figured it ought  to be
included. Second,  I've added  the Backroom; a  place for  more fringe
websites to be evaluated. You see, there's a whole seedy underbelly to
news media in 2023, which is  still inextricably connected to the main
media machine, and it needs to  be exposed. Because of the audience it
caters to  (who have  an affinity for  pattern recognition),  it tends
to  appear  more chaotic  and  less  cohesive.  That appearance  is  a
deception--the  fringe  media has  the  same  power structure  as  the
mainstream media. If I'm wrong, please  email me, I would love to know
where I  can find  anything akin  to "news"  that isn't  a manipulated
mess.

Going forward, I may also add a  section to vent (a blog, if you will)
about things related to news. Who knows what else.

Removing the  tinfoil hat for  now, I guess I  just wanted to  post an
update somewhere,  so those who may  have used notfox.com in  the past
could hear that it  is back online. Maybe cutting of  my 1-5 users was
an irreversible act, I don't know. But, I figured I'd try.

And if you haven't looked at notfox.com,  this might be a good time to
have a gander. I've had shockingly little feedback on it, so I have no
idea if it makes sense to anyone  who isn't in my brain (just me?). It
doesn't do a lot, but I enjoy what  it does do (to a degree). I'm here
if you have questions or comments.

***

There used to be a gopher version of notfox, when I was hosted on SDF.
I've migrated that over here, you can access it with this link:

gopher://consensus.circumlunar.space:70/1/notfox