5 ms·

Slop is everywhere for those with eyes to see

324 points by speckx 10mo ago

onion2k 10mo ago
If you spend your time worrying about what TikTok videos other people watch you've probably got too much time on your hands.
- ottah 10mo ago
  Seriously, stop worrying about what people do in their free time, and find you're own joy. It's not like your distaste is going to have any effect on the people who enjoy it, so stop worrying about it.
- nomel 10mo ago
  If you like absurdist humor, there's a really good chance you'll enjoy some of the humor focused AI video "algorithm tracks" (what's the proper name?) on TikTok.
- ceejayoz 10mo ago
  One might say the same about HN comments.
  - bloomingeek 10mo ago
    How dare you!
lotsofpulp 10mo ago
>Creativity isn't scalable. Content creation has a hard productivity ceiling. Every human-created video on our feeds require some level of writing, production, and editing. Yet the For You Page has made the content consumption so efficient, that perhaps demand has exceeded supply. I would have thought the opposite, the supply exceeded demand, driving the price so low so as to not be able to reward quality creators and/or curators. After all, demand has a hard ceiling at 24 hours per day.
- kiba 10mo ago
  The scarcity is in the originality and creativity. Once you watch LotR, you watched like 20 percent guesstimate of all fantasy content because every fantasy stories involved elves and dwarves often enough. Which is why sometime when I wonder why there's nothing to watch on YouTube despite the sheer abundance, it's time to work on something.
  - hvs 10mo ago
    And also why a large percentage of the "content" on YouTube is YouTubers reactions to other YouTubers.
  - MrGilbert 10mo ago
    > ... because every fantasy stories involved elves and dwarves often enough. I think there is still demand for an elvish court show, somewhere.
    - chuckadams 10mo ago
      Too much elaborate flowery argument. I want to see Orc Court.
- martin-t 10mo ago
  > After all, demand has a hard ceiling at 24 hours per day. I agree consumption is capped. I constantly struggle with whether to watch a given video or read a given article. I have an ever increasing to-watch and to-read list and unfortunately human life is too short to learn all the things I would want to. That being said, on the production side, it's a complex interplay between quality, quantity and discoverability. If it takes 10x the effort to increase quality 2x, then it might economical to produce 10x the number of videos with 1x the quality. I say might because those videos will be shared less, rated worse and will therefore have lower discoverability. But by how much? And you can't judge quality until after you've consumed the "content"[0]. So if the goal is to serve as many ads as possible, it's more economical to just make more "content". That's why I much prefer individual "creators" who clearly do what they do because they enjoy it. [0]: https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/#:~:text=this%20is%20why%20i%20absolutely%20cannot%20fucking%20stand%20creative%20work%20being%20referred%20to%20as%20%22content%22. https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/#:~:text...
daotoad 10mo ago
Off topic and doesn't impact the validity (or lack thereof) of the post. Just reactionary whining really... For the love of all that is good, "exacerbated" and "exasperated" are different words. We've already screwed up "home in on" by allowing the horrid "hone in" to horn in our lexicons. On a side note, watch out for those honing pigeons, they've got very sharp beaks.
- isoprophlex 10mo ago
  I've got a few well-homed knives in my kitchen. They're really happy where they are. I can leave them hone alone, too, which is nice.
- nkrisc 10mo ago
  To be fair, there is a logic behind “hone in on” that is at least plausible that relates to the intended meaning, and is perhaps somewhat responsible for it sticking around besides simply the similarity between “home” and “hone”.
  - schrectacular 10mo ago
    As much as it angers me to say it, I do believe it is an eggcorn.
    - nkrisc 10mo ago
      I agree, though remarkably it’s an eggcorn that is still sort of correct on its own.
      - daotoad 10mo ago
        This usage is a double misunderstanding, it gets both the phonetics of homing and the mechanics of sharpening a blade wrong. It’s like calling someone a “stropping young lad”.
        nkrisc 10mo ago
behnamoh 10mo ago
Side note: I love the imperfect fonts and old school design of the website. For years I've been looking for ways to re-create old book style text and graphs in the digital era. This gets so close to that vision.
- watersb 10mo ago
  I generally like it, too, but on my iPhone that very first sentence puts a spotlight in the lack of an 'fl' ligature in the word, "influence". Now I'm reconsidering my resolve to look for AI slop - my enthusiasm for topography is getting in the way. https://wondermark.com/c/650/ https://wondermark.com/c/650/
  - TacticalCoder 10mo ago
    > my enthusiasm for topography funny topo you made! I've written and typeset books. It's not so much that there's no "fl" ligature: it's that with that font the lack of a "fl" ligature really makes it bad looking. With many other fonts it wouldn't be anywhere near that bad (and I'm not just only about monospace).
- rjsw 10mo ago
  You might be interested in the resources [1] on the H.P.Lovecraft Historical Society website. [1] https://www.hplhs.org/resources.php#fonts https://www.hplhs.org/resources.php#fonts
  - Levitating 10mo ago
    Oh thats great. I also use the wallpaper on https://hplovecraft.com/ https://hplovecraft.com/ as my actual wallpaper.
  - imiric 10mo ago
    These are great, but the effect breaks down with digital fonts since every glyph instance is the same. There would have to be slight variations of each, and other imperfections caused by a typewriter or printing process. I'm not sure I like the effect of the font in the article. The subtle vertical position differences and inconsistent kerning are distracting. Typewriters and physical printing are not sloppy in that sense.
maerF0x0 10mo ago
From the Article: > Olive oil, wasabi, saffron, vanilla, Wagyu, honey, champagne, and truffle,...reality TV from AI: > lobster was once considered "garbage meat," so abundant in colonial America that it was fed to prisoners, slaves, and servants, sometimes leading to complaints and even laws limiting its servings The decision that something is slop or good is subjective and ever changing.
- turtletontine 10mo ago
  The authors point is not that these things are “slop” in and of themselves, it’s that the demand for each of these so outpaces supply that the market is full of low quality (sometimes fraudulent) knock offs. AKA… slop.
- FarmerPotato 10mo ago
  Yes, and before modern leisure time, beaches were uncanny haunts. The borderland where shipwrecks were found and dead things floated ashore. Beaches and lobster are real things in the natural world. Slop is something else.
- the__alchemist 10mo ago
  Ground with shell on I have heard; not prepared in the modern way.
  - bandrami 10mo ago
    The preparation sounds more classy when you call it "bisque"
47thpresident 10mo ago
> If it were up to TikTok and Meta, our feeds would be exclusively robot-made. Humans are a variable they cannot control, and I think they despise us for it. OpenAI’s Sora mobile app is the experiment to see if human beings will tolerate total AI content consumption. We’ll see how that will go.
- raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
  And it quickly answered the question - “no”. It was a brief flash in the pan and people moved on.
- not_ai 10mo ago
  Not really, it’s just the interface OpenAI gave for creating short videos with their AI. They push people to it hoping for engagement, but it’s not the sole reason people go — unlike TikTok.
- Anon1096 10mo ago
  No, Sora is an experiment if humans will knowingly consume a fully AI feed. But FB, IG, Reddit, Hacker News, etc social media is already full of slop, labeled or not. And it's there because that's what humans are choosing to engage the most with.
  - bandrami 10mo ago
    "Choosing" is doing a lot of work in that sentence
kgwxd 10mo ago
AI has made me hate real people even more that I already did. Constantly seeing human behavior emulated amplifies how much real people are on auto-pilot, even (especially?) the parts that make them "them".
OGEnthusiast 10mo ago
The upshot is that having everything be AI slop could be what breaks our collective addiction to chronic screen time/usage.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- dashundchen 10mo ago
  The only winning move is not to play. First I removed the Instagram app from my phone, because it was full of dark patterns meant to keep users scrolling. Endless reposted stories from people you follow, endless suggested posts when you ran out of posts from people you actually know, and then the slop bucket known as reels. I found myself sucked in too often. I used the web app version on my phone for a bit, which has a lot fewer dark patterns, but eventually I ditched that too because I found myself checking it out of habit. Now I still have a login on my desktop browser, because for whatever reason some businesses insist on only sharing hours/menus etc via an Instagram post. But I'm close to pulling the plug on Instagram altogether. Is there an xcancel equivalent for Instagram that lets me bypass the login wall in a pinch? I also added a ublock origin filter list for tuning out social media distractions. Now my YouTube and Reddits are essentially blank feeds - no suggested posts, stories or recommendations. https://github.com/BevizLaszlo/UBlock-Filters-for-Social-Media https://github.com/BevizLaszlo/UBlock-Filters-for-Social-Med...
  - socalgal2 10mo ago
    I re-installed the Instagram app recently because a few too many things I wanted to see (events, restaurants) only had an Instagram link :( What I found is that sometime betweent the last time I used it and now they add a "Following" button at the top center. If I click that the moment I start the app then I get nothing but posts from people I'm following. If I forget then I get random shit they're trying to addict me to. At least, at the moment, I have the option to just see my friends. X is the same. There's a "home" feed and a "following" feed at the top. The moment I open it I pick "following" and then I only see people I follow. I don't use either of them all that much but I'm happy that, at least for now. It's possible to use them without the slop. That said, I know everyone else had this experience but the Facebook app has finally hit too low of a signal to noise ratio for me. For some reason to the end of 2025 I got very little non-friend posts. As of 2026 is about 3 to 2 crap I didn't ask for >:(
abdibrokhim 10mo ago
[flagged]
erelong 10mo ago
If you don't like the "slop" you can probably "avert thine eyes"
- jfengel 10mo ago
  You really can't, not without also swearing off a ton of genuine content. You can swear off the Internet entirely, and maybe that's a net win, but other than that you're almost certain to encounter slop. And it may take longer than you like to sort the wheat from the chaff.
alexpotato 10mo ago
From a personal perspective: I have a niche Instagram account that goes out to find content and then "reposts" it. There were several fun aspects of this e.g. finding good content, writing my own little algorithm to prioritize contents from older posts on smaller accounts etc. Lately, much as others have said, you are seeing entire accounts of AI generated images that are high quality, near photo realistic and consistent e.g. it looks like the same person in different scenes/times of day etc You sometimes hear the quote about "pre-war steel" that hadn't been hit by radiation and that's EXACTLY what it feels like looking for an account with posts from before ~2022. I wonder if the above means that people are going to spend less time online and prioritize "in real life" events or if the slop is just going to get more addicted. Probably a mix of both in the same way that Tough Mudder/Spartan Races became popular while at the same time the number of other people NOT leaving their houses went up.
- will_pseudonym 10mo ago
  the great bifurcation will continue apace
  - hackyhacky 10mo ago
    > the great bifurcation will continue apace The heterofurries and homofurries will be furious.
- gear54rus 10mo ago
  The only missing piece is hiding the time something was posted :) Why would anyone use any of those crap websites is beyond me.
- samiwami 10mo ago
  I think CEO of Instagram publicly admitted that the Social Media aspect of Instagram peaked around 2020 and has been declining since - he claimed it was being replaced by more group chats, private stories.
pilooch 10mo ago
Synthetic data for human (machine) learning... We should spend more time outside, we will!
jadenpeterson 10mo ago
I mean sure, this is trivially true, but there's some nuance here. For example, I could find slop in the above threads. Ultimately, while slop, we have to focus on outcomes. If they produce content with some truth in them, they're truthful, regardless of whether an AI agent did or didn't write them. As for 'eyes to see', I think ignorise is bliss here. If a tree falls in a forest, and someone sees it but can't understand the tree has fallen, what's the point discussing the demerits of felling trees?
- godelski 10mo ago
  > we have to focus on outcomes I think there's some nuance here... There is an important question that needs to be asked: why is someone watching content? There's a big difference between watching something because they are interested and engaged in the topic vs watching because they're doom scrolling. I'd argue this is an important business question as if it's the latter you're very open to disruption. I think the problem is that many companies have cornered the market and have shifted strategy to wealth extraction. Resting on their laurels. It makes sense from that perspective to trade quality for revenue, as there's no competition, but by doing so you also lower the barrier to entry for competitors while driving demand/motivation for competitors. Striking a balance between aggressive profit maximization and maintaining a cornered market is difficult. The only long term strategy is to play against an imaginary adversary but the short term profit maximization is incredibly tempting. Not to mention highly profitable for those that are at the top before it collapses. Are those people more dedicated to filling their pockets or to the long term survival of the company? It's clearly the former if they do not even consider that the company could lose its dominance. You're right, we should focus on outcomes, but I don't think outcomes are very easy to measure. What outcomes? Over what time frame?
- coldtea 10mo ago
  >If they produce content with some truth in them, they're truthful, regardless of whether an AI agent did or didn't write them Nope, they're still slop. Just like a spam message about a product you actually like is still spam.
JohnMakin 10mo ago
The thing I hate and this article kind of gets at in a roundabout way is how much slop is encouraged by the algorithm if you are a creator. I've mentioned on this account a bunch of times I'm a very small-scale content creator (4 digit follower count) that has never monetized or really tried to monetize - making content, even if no one or very few people watch it is a hobby I just enjoy whether I make money or not. Recently though it's been pointed out to me in harsh ways I could be easily growing if I tried a little harder, so I've invested more resources into the channel, equipment, actually trying growth, etc. What I have noticed is that the content I make often or usually has to change in ways the FYP algorithm likes, or it will be lost into the ether, no matter how much money I put into it. So in a way the FYP is deciding which content it likes, which affects what creators put out, which to me destroys the entire creative process and makes slop necessary. I deeply resent it, I don't want to participate in it, and a decision inevitably gets made where you have to be like "do I want to get bigger and make money, or do I want to make the content I want to make?" Only the very, very lucky get both if you're on one of these major platforms. One thing I particularly hated was as a twitch partner I notice that if I show ads, more traffic is then driven to my channel. That fundamentally compromises my content IMO. I understand why they as a business would want me to show ads, but I very much do not want to show them. Yes, I can migrate or try to host my own content, so I am accepting this reality by staying, but it wasn't always this way.
- 9dev 10mo ago
  There’s a neat little story called "Anecdote on Lowering the work ethic" that you might like. You can read the plot on the Wikipedia page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbeitsmoral https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbei...
  - blargey 10mo ago
    "More reach" seems a valid enough goal/desire in and of itself (even if you deride it as a shallow form of communication, shallow attention is what provides the opportunity for deeper connections); this sets the goal-activity of creative pursuits apart from "lounging alone at the beach" (which is itself a flawed representation of retirement, but that's another story).
deafpolygon 10mo ago
But where we're going, we don't need eyes to see...
- galacticaactual 10mo ago
  Apt reference.
- auggierose 10mo ago
  Libera te tutemet!
kaonwarb 10mo ago
Ironically given the topic, the very first sentence on the page ("The size of your plate can influence how much food you eat.") is based on observational research that has not replicated in controlled studies. [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2129126/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2129126/ [1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12966-019-0826-1?utm_source=chatgpt.com http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12966-019-0826-1?u...
- ggm 10mo ago
  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5598018/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5598018/ Duelling articles at 50 paces. Same publication channel.
- e40 10mo ago
  I have definitely noticed that I will eat more or less depending on the size of the plate. Maybe it only applies to people who were taught to clean their plate, dunno.
  - NewJazz 10mo ago
    For me it would probably depend on if I dished myself. Also at a restaurant taking food to go is pretty normalized. Vs. At a dinner party you might feel like you should just eat the whole dish.
- hyperbovine 10mo ago
  That’s not irony. Interesting, perhaps, but not ironic. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/what-irony-is-not/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/what-irony-is-not/
  - nerdponx 10mo ago
    It's certainly ironic if an article about slop leads with a tired old glob of pseudoscience slop and the author doesn't realize.
burnto 10mo ago
It’s fast food content. Convenient, cheap, fast, tasty, but also monotonous, unsophisticated, unhealthy, habit-forming. People consume more and more of it until they get sick, and even then won’t stop.
- int_19h 10mo ago
  This has already described much of pop culture for decades, though. Turns out that humans actually like slop.
  - estearum 10mo ago
    "Turns out humans actually like heroin." -- antisocial scumbag justifying being an antisocial scumbag.
    - int_19h 10mo ago
      What I'm saying is that if you want to make that analogy, be consistent and take it all the way. We are already on heroin, have been for a long time, this is just the age when it's cheap and abundant like never before.
  - flowerthoughts 10mo ago
    > Turns out that humans actually like slop... ... more than being bored.
    - int_19h 10mo ago
      Not really? For the past few decades even truly exotic and unusual preferences could be accommodated, but people still prefer certain things which we identify as "pop culture" - and it's mostly slop.
Bombthecat 10mo ago
And it's just the beginning, I expect around 95 percent of new content will be ai in a few years. From comments to videos to blog posts
- rootusrootus 10mo ago
  If we are smart, we will remember this and allow 95% of the consumption to be AI, too. Might as well let the thing talk to itself instead of waste our time.
  - Analemma_ 10mo ago
    I mean, there's a decent chance it already is. Advertising platforms are very cagey about just how many ad impressions are actually from bots, but 95% doesn't sound a priori impossible to me. If it's not at that level yet, it probably will be soon.
- RobRivera 10mo ago
  I've personally begun taking an incredibly critical eye at the pop culture I allow myself to consume, and have been recently making a movie playlist from films before 1990 or so. The craft is noticeably different.
Anon1096 10mo ago
I don't agree with the article that the top couple content creators can walk away and kill a platform. Vine committed suicide for no real reason, it's a pretty poor example to point to. Nowadays on any top social media there's 1-3% of creators making the vast majority of popular content, but more importantly, there's another 15% of people out there who are vying to try and take their spots and will gladly fill the void should the top creators leave. They're mostly just not doing well because the top is being crowded out (and the algorithm keeps it that way), not for lack of trying.
- vineanddine 10mo ago
  Vine died because Twitter made sure it died. The same with Periscope, nothing more.
  - whattheheckheck 10mo ago
    Vines back actually by the guy that killed it https://www.newsweek.com/divine-everything-we-know-about-vines-reboot-11048434 https://www.newsweek.com/divine-everything-we-know-about-vin...
    - vineanddine 10mo ago
      [dead]
- j45 10mo ago
  I'm not sure if it's an issue of the percentage of users creating content, but rather the percentage of new content creators zooming to the level of average ai copy which is higher than their starting point. I do wonder if it will limit or improve their growth to learn to communicate beyond it as the drivers behind the seat instead of the passengers.
- Tanoc 10mo ago
  With content creation platforms there is absolutely no way one person or even ten people at the highest levels could kill them by leaving. In fact, as has been shown on Youtube and Twitch it usually makes the platform healthier because there's not one monolith to develop a strategy around bootlegging from. There have been several dozen gargantuan channels and several hundred giant channels on Youtube who have either left or just stopped uploading and Youtube still carries on. Youtube isn't carried by the Mr. Beasts and FailArmies who grab forty million views an upload, it's carried by thousands of smaller channels who get less than a million views per video. With places like Reddit, Tumblr, and Imgur there are no giants, as everything is siloed so much that users in one community don't know much of what's outside that community, making it impossible for a handful of creators leaving to kill it.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
daedrdev 10mo ago
> Outside of our FYPs you'll find a surplus of art, essays, articles, and videos just waiting to be discovered I like the article, but its annoying to say "it's there!" as if most of these these alternate sources aren't mostly on other social media sites or dying a slow death
shevy-java 10mo ago
> We are over consuming content on the FYP. The sudden surge of low-quality, AI-generated content, i.e. “AI slop,” is a byproduct of that overconsumption. It is worse, because even if you scroll down 1000 videos, human-generated, a few of them may be useful. With AI slop, we now have a spam of low quality crap that just wastes time. They are ruining the world wide web right now. Yesterday was the first time Qwant delivered better results than Google search. I am scared.
j45 10mo ago
I suspect slop recognition might become a new skill that has it's own value.
dhosek 10mo ago
This is one of the things that I like about BlueSky. The only algorithmic feed I use is one that highlights quiet posters (https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vpkhqolt662uhesyj6nxm7ys/feed/infreq https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vpkhqolt662uhesyj6nxm7ys/fe...). I’ll go to the main feed once in a while, but the “discover” feed is one I ended up unpinning entirely.
keybored 10mo ago
Anyone who complains about dopamine is an obvious 2016 infotainment slave.
Garlef 10mo ago
I recently had the pleasure of reading a few books out of the "Thomas the Tank Engine" Childrens-Content Universe to my nephew. Slop is definitely everywhere.
metalman 10mo ago
there are so many things published that I make it a couple of paragraphs in, and get the cold grue from the impossibly bad phrasing and disconected garble. other times it's something filled with lots and lots of stated fact and figures in an authorative voice, that is lacking any solid evidence of experience, some sort of combination of news anchor and nobel lauriat that ,again gives the cold grue, and makes me wish for brain wash fluid. fuck it, the web is dead

324 points by speckx 10mo ago

If you spend your time worrying about what TikTok videos other people watch you've probably got too much time on your hands.

ottah 10mo ago
Seriously, stop worrying about what people do in their free time, and find you're own joy. It's not like your distaste is going to have any effect on the people who enjoy it, so stop worrying about it.
nomel 10mo ago
If you like absurdist humor, there's a really good chance you'll enjoy some of the humor focused AI video "algorithm tracks" (what's the proper name?) on TikTok.
ceejayoz 10mo ago
One might say the same about HN comments.
- bloomingeek 10mo ago
  How dare you!

lotsofpulp 10mo ago

>Creativity isn't scalable. Content creation has a hard productivity ceiling. Every human-created video on our feeds require some level of writing, production, and editing. Yet the For You Page has made the content consumption so efficient, that perhaps demand has exceeded supply. I would have thought the opposite, the supply exceeded demand, driving the price so low so as to not be able to reward quality creators and/or curators. After all, demand has a hard ceiling at 24 hours per day.

kiba 10mo ago
The scarcity is in the originality and creativity. Once you watch LotR, you watched like 20 percent guesstimate of all fantasy content because every fantasy stories involved elves and dwarves often enough. Which is why sometime when I wonder why there's nothing to watch on YouTube despite the sheer abundance, it's time to work on something.
- hvs 10mo ago
  And also why a large percentage of the "content" on YouTube is YouTubers reactions to other YouTubers.
- MrGilbert 10mo ago
  > ... because every fantasy stories involved elves and dwarves often enough. I think there is still demand for an elvish court show, somewhere.
  - chuckadams 10mo ago
    Too much elaborate flowery argument. I want to see Orc Court.
martin-t 10mo ago
> After all, demand has a hard ceiling at 24 hours per day. I agree consumption is capped. I constantly struggle with whether to watch a given video or read a given article. I have an ever increasing to-watch and to-read list and unfortunately human life is too short to learn all the things I would want to. That being said, on the production side, it's a complex interplay between quality, quantity and discoverability. If it takes 10x the effort to increase quality 2x, then it might economical to produce 10x the number of videos with 1x the quality. I say might because those videos will be shared less, rated worse and will therefore have lower discoverability. But by how much? And you can't judge quality until after you've consumed the "content"[0]. So if the goal is to serve as many ads as possible, it's more economical to just make more "content". That's why I much prefer individual "creators" who clearly do what they do because they enjoy it. [0]: https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/#:~:text=this%20is%20why%20i%20absolutely%20cannot%20fucking%20stand%20creative%20work%20being%20referred%20to%20as%20%22content%22. https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/#:~:text...

daotoad 10mo ago

Off topic and doesn't impact the validity (or lack thereof) of the post. Just reactionary whining really... For the love of all that is good, "exacerbated" and "exasperated" are different words. We've already screwed up "home in on" by allowing the horrid "hone in" to horn in our lexicons. On a side note, watch out for those honing pigeons, they've got very sharp beaks.

isoprophlex 10mo ago
I've got a few well-homed knives in my kitchen. They're really happy where they are. I can leave them hone alone, too, which is nice.
nkrisc 10mo ago
To be fair, there is a logic behind “hone in on” that is at least plausible that relates to the intended meaning, and is perhaps somewhat responsible for it sticking around besides simply the similarity between “home” and “hone”.
- schrectacular 10mo ago
  As much as it angers me to say it, I do believe it is an eggcorn.
  - nkrisc 10mo ago
    I agree, though remarkably it’s an eggcorn that is still sort of correct on its own.
    - daotoad 10mo ago
      This usage is a double misunderstanding, it gets both the phonetics of homing and the mechanics of sharpening a blade wrong. It’s like calling someone a “stropping young lad”.
      - nkrisc 10mo ago

behnamoh 10mo ago

Side note: I love the imperfect fonts and old school design of the website. For years I've been looking for ways to re-create old book style text and graphs in the digital era. This gets so close to that vision.

watersb 10mo ago
I generally like it, too, but on my iPhone that very first sentence puts a spotlight in the lack of an 'fl' ligature in the word, "influence". Now I'm reconsidering my resolve to look for AI slop - my enthusiasm for topography is getting in the way. https://wondermark.com/c/650/ https://wondermark.com/c/650/
- TacticalCoder 10mo ago
  > my enthusiasm for topography funny topo you made! I've written and typeset books. It's not so much that there's no "fl" ligature: it's that with that font the lack of a "fl" ligature really makes it bad looking. With many other fonts it wouldn't be anywhere near that bad (and I'm not just only about monospace).
rjsw 10mo ago
You might be interested in the resources [1] on the H.P.Lovecraft Historical Society website. [1] https://www.hplhs.org/resources.php#fonts https://www.hplhs.org/resources.php#fonts
- Levitating 10mo ago
  Oh thats great. I also use the wallpaper on https://hplovecraft.com/ https://hplovecraft.com/ as my actual wallpaper.
- imiric 10mo ago
  These are great, but the effect breaks down with digital fonts since every glyph instance is the same. There would have to be slight variations of each, and other imperfections caused by a typewriter or printing process. I'm not sure I like the effect of the font in the article. The subtle vertical position differences and inconsistent kerning are distracting. Typewriters and physical printing are not sloppy in that sense.

maerF0x0 10mo ago

From the Article: > Olive oil, wasabi, saffron, vanilla, Wagyu, honey, champagne, and truffle,...reality TV from AI: > lobster was once considered "garbage meat," so abundant in colonial America that it was fed to prisoners, slaves, and servants, sometimes leading to complaints and even laws limiting its servings The decision that something is slop or good is subjective and ever changing.

turtletontine 10mo ago
The authors point is not that these things are “slop” in and of themselves, it’s that the demand for each of these so outpaces supply that the market is full of low quality (sometimes fraudulent) knock offs. AKA… slop.
FarmerPotato 10mo ago
Yes, and before modern leisure time, beaches were uncanny haunts. The borderland where shipwrecks were found and dead things floated ashore. Beaches and lobster are real things in the natural world. Slop is something else.
the__alchemist 10mo ago
Ground with shell on I have heard; not prepared in the modern way.
- bandrami 10mo ago
  The preparation sounds more classy when you call it "bisque"

47thpresident 10mo ago

> If it were up to TikTok and Meta, our feeds would be exclusively robot-made. Humans are a variable they cannot control, and I think they despise us for it. OpenAI’s Sora mobile app is the experiment to see if human beings will tolerate total AI content consumption. We’ll see how that will go.

raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
And it quickly answered the question - “no”. It was a brief flash in the pan and people moved on.
not_ai 10mo ago
Not really, it’s just the interface OpenAI gave for creating short videos with their AI. They push people to it hoping for engagement, but it’s not the sole reason people go — unlike TikTok.
Anon1096 10mo ago
No, Sora is an experiment if humans will knowingly consume a fully AI feed. But FB, IG, Reddit, Hacker News, etc social media is already full of slop, labeled or not. And it's there because that's what humans are choosing to engage the most with.
- bandrami 10mo ago
  "Choosing" is doing a lot of work in that sentence

kgwxd 10mo ago

AI has made me hate real people even more that I already did. Constantly seeing human behavior emulated amplifies how much real people are on auto-pilot, even (especially?) the parts that make them "them".

OGEnthusiast 10mo ago

The upshot is that having everything be AI slop could be what breaks our collective addiction to chronic screen time/usage.

deleted 10mo ago
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dashundchen 10mo ago
The only winning move is not to play. First I removed the Instagram app from my phone, because it was full of dark patterns meant to keep users scrolling. Endless reposted stories from people you follow, endless suggested posts when you ran out of posts from people you actually know, and then the slop bucket known as reels. I found myself sucked in too often. I used the web app version on my phone for a bit, which has a lot fewer dark patterns, but eventually I ditched that too because I found myself checking it out of habit. Now I still have a login on my desktop browser, because for whatever reason some businesses insist on only sharing hours/menus etc via an Instagram post. But I'm close to pulling the plug on Instagram altogether. Is there an xcancel equivalent for Instagram that lets me bypass the login wall in a pinch? I also added a ublock origin filter list for tuning out social media distractions. Now my YouTube and Reddits are essentially blank feeds - no suggested posts, stories or recommendations. https://github.com/BevizLaszlo/UBlock-Filters-for-Social-Media https://github.com/BevizLaszlo/UBlock-Filters-for-Social-Med...
- socalgal2 10mo ago
  I re-installed the Instagram app recently because a few too many things I wanted to see (events, restaurants) only had an Instagram link :( What I found is that sometime betweent the last time I used it and now they add a "Following" button at the top center. If I click that the moment I start the app then I get nothing but posts from people I'm following. If I forget then I get random shit they're trying to addict me to. At least, at the moment, I have the option to just see my friends. X is the same. There's a "home" feed and a "following" feed at the top. The moment I open it I pick "following" and then I only see people I follow. I don't use either of them all that much but I'm happy that, at least for now. It's possible to use them without the slop. That said, I know everyone else had this experience but the Facebook app has finally hit too low of a signal to noise ratio for me. For some reason to the end of 2025 I got very little non-friend posts. As of 2026 is about 3 to 2 crap I didn't ask for >:(

abdibrokhim 10mo ago

[flagged]

erelong 10mo ago

If you don't like the "slop" you can probably "avert thine eyes"

jfengel 10mo ago
You really can't, not without also swearing off a ton of genuine content. You can swear off the Internet entirely, and maybe that's a net win, but other than that you're almost certain to encounter slop. And it may take longer than you like to sort the wheat from the chaff.

alexpotato 10mo ago

From a personal perspective: I have a niche Instagram account that goes out to find content and then "reposts" it. There were several fun aspects of this e.g. finding good content, writing my own little algorithm to prioritize contents from older posts on smaller accounts etc. Lately, much as others have said, you are seeing entire accounts of AI generated images that are high quality, near photo realistic and consistent e.g. it looks like the same person in different scenes/times of day etc You sometimes hear the quote about "pre-war steel" that hadn't been hit by radiation and that's EXACTLY what it feels like looking for an account with posts from before ~2022. I wonder if the above means that people are going to spend less time online and prioritize "in real life" events or if the slop is just going to get more addicted. Probably a mix of both in the same way that Tough Mudder/Spartan Races became popular while at the same time the number of other people NOT leaving their houses went up.

will_pseudonym 10mo ago
the great bifurcation will continue apace
- hackyhacky 10mo ago
  > the great bifurcation will continue apace The heterofurries and homofurries will be furious.
gear54rus 10mo ago
The only missing piece is hiding the time something was posted :) Why would anyone use any of those crap websites is beyond me.
samiwami 10mo ago
I think CEO of Instagram publicly admitted that the Social Media aspect of Instagram peaked around 2020 and has been declining since - he claimed it was being replaced by more group chats, private stories.

pilooch 10mo ago

Synthetic data for human (machine) learning... We should spend more time outside, we will!

jadenpeterson 10mo ago

I mean sure, this is trivially true, but there's some nuance here. For example, I could find slop in the above threads. Ultimately, while slop, we have to focus on outcomes. If they produce content with some truth in them, they're truthful, regardless of whether an AI agent did or didn't write them. As for 'eyes to see', I think ignorise is bliss here. If a tree falls in a forest, and someone sees it but can't understand the tree has fallen, what's the point discussing the demerits of felling trees?

godelski 10mo ago
> we have to focus on outcomes I think there's some nuance here... There is an important question that needs to be asked: why is someone watching content? There's a big difference between watching something because they are interested and engaged in the topic vs watching because they're doom scrolling. I'd argue this is an important business question as if it's the latter you're very open to disruption. I think the problem is that many companies have cornered the market and have shifted strategy to wealth extraction. Resting on their laurels. It makes sense from that perspective to trade quality for revenue, as there's no competition, but by doing so you also lower the barrier to entry for competitors while driving demand/motivation for competitors. Striking a balance between aggressive profit maximization and maintaining a cornered market is difficult. The only long term strategy is to play against an imaginary adversary but the short term profit maximization is incredibly tempting. Not to mention highly profitable for those that are at the top before it collapses. Are those people more dedicated to filling their pockets or to the long term survival of the company? It's clearly the former if they do not even consider that the company could lose its dominance. You're right, we should focus on outcomes, but I don't think outcomes are very easy to measure. What outcomes? Over what time frame?
coldtea 10mo ago
>If they produce content with some truth in them, they're truthful, regardless of whether an AI agent did or didn't write them Nope, they're still slop. Just like a spam message about a product you actually like is still spam.

JohnMakin 10mo ago

The thing I hate and this article kind of gets at in a roundabout way is how much slop is encouraged by the algorithm if you are a creator. I've mentioned on this account a bunch of times I'm a very small-scale content creator (4 digit follower count) that has never monetized or really tried to monetize - making content, even if no one or very few people watch it is a hobby I just enjoy whether I make money or not. Recently though it's been pointed out to me in harsh ways I could be easily growing if I tried a little harder, so I've invested more resources into the channel, equipment, actually trying growth, etc. What I have noticed is that the content I make often or usually has to change in ways the FYP algorithm likes, or it will be lost into the ether, no matter how much money I put into it. So in a way the FYP is deciding which content it likes, which affects what creators put out, which to me destroys the entire creative process and makes slop necessary. I deeply resent it, I don't want to participate in it, and a decision inevitably gets made where you have to be like "do I want to get bigger and make money, or do I want to make the content I want to make?" Only the very, very lucky get both if you're on one of these major platforms. One thing I particularly hated was as a twitch partner I notice that if I show ads, more traffic is then driven to my channel. That fundamentally compromises my content IMO. I understand why they as a business would want me to show ads, but I very much do not want to show them. Yes, I can migrate or try to host my own content, so I am accepting this reality by staying, but it wasn't always this way.

9dev 10mo ago
There’s a neat little story called "Anecdote on Lowering the work ethic" that you might like. You can read the plot on the Wikipedia page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbeitsmoral https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbei...
- blargey 10mo ago
  "More reach" seems a valid enough goal/desire in and of itself (even if you deride it as a shallow form of communication, shallow attention is what provides the opportunity for deeper connections); this sets the goal-activity of creative pursuits apart from "lounging alone at the beach" (which is itself a flawed representation of retirement, but that's another story).

deafpolygon 10mo ago

But where we're going, we don't need eyes to see...

galacticaactual 10mo ago
Apt reference.
auggierose 10mo ago
Libera te tutemet!

kaonwarb 10mo ago

Ironically given the topic, the very first sentence on the page ("The size of your plate can influence how much food you eat.") is based on observational research that has not replicated in controlled studies. [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2129126/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2129126/ [1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12966-019-0826-1?utm_source=chatgpt.com http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12966-019-0826-1?u...

ggm 10mo ago
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5598018/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5598018/ Duelling articles at 50 paces. Same publication channel.
e40 10mo ago
I have definitely noticed that I will eat more or less depending on the size of the plate. Maybe it only applies to people who were taught to clean their plate, dunno.
- NewJazz 10mo ago
  For me it would probably depend on if I dished myself. Also at a restaurant taking food to go is pretty normalized. Vs. At a dinner party you might feel like you should just eat the whole dish.
hyperbovine 10mo ago
That’s not irony. Interesting, perhaps, but not ironic. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/what-irony-is-not/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/what-irony-is-not/
- nerdponx 10mo ago
  It's certainly ironic if an article about slop leads with a tired old glob of pseudoscience slop and the author doesn't realize.

burnto 10mo ago

It’s fast food content. Convenient, cheap, fast, tasty, but also monotonous, unsophisticated, unhealthy, habit-forming. People consume more and more of it until they get sick, and even then won’t stop.

int_19h 10mo ago
This has already described much of pop culture for decades, though. Turns out that humans actually like slop.
- estearum 10mo ago
  "Turns out humans actually like heroin." -- antisocial scumbag justifying being an antisocial scumbag.
  - int_19h 10mo ago
    What I'm saying is that if you want to make that analogy, be consistent and take it all the way. We are already on heroin, have been for a long time, this is just the age when it's cheap and abundant like never before.
- flowerthoughts 10mo ago
  > Turns out that humans actually like slop... ... more than being bored.
  - int_19h 10mo ago
    Not really? For the past few decades even truly exotic and unusual preferences could be accommodated, but people still prefer certain things which we identify as "pop culture" - and it's mostly slop.

Bombthecat 10mo ago

And it's just the beginning, I expect around 95 percent of new content will be ai in a few years. From comments to videos to blog posts

rootusrootus 10mo ago
If we are smart, we will remember this and allow 95% of the consumption to be AI, too. Might as well let the thing talk to itself instead of waste our time.
- Analemma_ 10mo ago
  I mean, there's a decent chance it already is. Advertising platforms are very cagey about just how many ad impressions are actually from bots, but 95% doesn't sound a priori impossible to me. If it's not at that level yet, it probably will be soon.
RobRivera 10mo ago
I've personally begun taking an incredibly critical eye at the pop culture I allow myself to consume, and have been recently making a movie playlist from films before 1990 or so. The craft is noticeably different.

Anon1096 10mo ago

I don't agree with the article that the top couple content creators can walk away and kill a platform. Vine committed suicide for no real reason, it's a pretty poor example to point to. Nowadays on any top social media there's 1-3% of creators making the vast majority of popular content, but more importantly, there's another 15% of people out there who are vying to try and take their spots and will gladly fill the void should the top creators leave. They're mostly just not doing well because the top is being crowded out (and the algorithm keeps it that way), not for lack of trying.

vineanddine 10mo ago
Vine died because Twitter made sure it died. The same with Periscope, nothing more.
- whattheheckheck 10mo ago
  Vines back actually by the guy that killed it https://www.newsweek.com/divine-everything-we-know-about-vines-reboot-11048434 https://www.newsweek.com/divine-everything-we-know-about-vin...
  - vineanddine 10mo ago
    [dead]
j45 10mo ago
I'm not sure if it's an issue of the percentage of users creating content, but rather the percentage of new content creators zooming to the level of average ai copy which is higher than their starting point. I do wonder if it will limit or improve their growth to learn to communicate beyond it as the drivers behind the seat instead of the passengers.
Tanoc 10mo ago
With content creation platforms there is absolutely no way one person or even ten people at the highest levels could kill them by leaving. In fact, as has been shown on Youtube and Twitch it usually makes the platform healthier because there's not one monolith to develop a strategy around bootlegging from. There have been several dozen gargantuan channels and several hundred giant channels on Youtube who have either left or just stopped uploading and Youtube still carries on. Youtube isn't carried by the Mr. Beasts and FailArmies who grab forty million views an upload, it's carried by thousands of smaller channels who get less than a million views per video. With places like Reddit, Tumblr, and Imgur there are no giants, as everything is siloed so much that users in one community don't know much of what's outside that community, making it impossible for a handful of creators leaving to kill it.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

daedrdev 10mo ago

> Outside of our FYPs you'll find a surplus of art, essays, articles, and videos just waiting to be discovered I like the article, but its annoying to say "it's there!" as if most of these these alternate sources aren't mostly on other social media sites or dying a slow death

shevy-java 10mo ago

> We are over consuming content on the FYP. The sudden surge of low-quality, AI-generated content, i.e. “AI slop,” is a byproduct of that overconsumption. It is worse, because even if you scroll down 1000 videos, human-generated, a few of them may be useful. With AI slop, we now have a spam of low quality crap that just wastes time. They are ruining the world wide web right now. Yesterday was the first time Qwant delivered better results than Google search. I am scared.

j45 10mo ago

I suspect slop recognition might become a new skill that has it's own value.

dhosek 10mo ago

This is one of the things that I like about BlueSky. The only algorithmic feed I use is one that highlights quiet posters (https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vpkhqolt662uhesyj6nxm7ys/feed/infreq https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vpkhqolt662uhesyj6nxm7ys/fe...). I’ll go to the main feed once in a while, but the “discover” feed is one I ended up unpinning entirely.

keybored 10mo ago

Anyone who complains about dopamine is an obvious 2016 infotainment slave.

Garlef 10mo ago

I recently had the pleasure of reading a few books out of the "Thomas the Tank Engine" Childrens-Content Universe to my nephew. Slop is definitely everywhere.

metalman 10mo ago

there are so many things published that I make it a couple of paragraphs in, and get the cold grue from the impossibly bad phrasing and disconected garble. other times it's something filled with lots and lots of stated fact and figures in an authorative voice, that is lacking any solid evidence of experience, some sort of combination of news anchor and nobel lauriat that ,again gives the cold grue, and makes me wish for brain wash fluid. fuck it, the web is dead