The time Pieter Wuille DM'd me
My first interaction on Twitter was with Bitcoin Core developer Pieter Wuille. He DM'd me and asked how my trade was going. I thanked him sincerely for his many contributions to Bitcoin.
It was mindblowing to think that I could have a conversation with such a giant, as if we were on the same playing field. One of the great wonders of the internet.
Sadly, AI slop is making genuine interactions like these less and less common.
Junk food tastes good, slop doesn't
The internet has always been full of garbage and scammers, so what is new about slop?
The conversation around slop reminds me of how people used to talk about junk food in the '90s. Junk food is low value and bad for you, taking room that should go to more nutritious food. Where it differs from slop is that people actually want to eat junk food. Nobody wants to read slop. So why do we have it?
The only people who want slop are the people who post it.
How to make slop
You don't have to do much looking to find services that help you generate slop comments and posts.
Here's a screenshot of one:
Buffer is another company that offers a social media post generator (I know people who use Buffer for their social media scheduling and coordination services, but apparently you can turn it into a full out AI slop firehose.)
They advertise themselves like this:
Stay consistent, creative, and productive with SocialBee's free AI social media post generator. -SocialBee
Generate engaging social posts in just a few clicks for FREE! -RADAAR
Say goodbye to writer’s block and effortlessly generate ideas for your social media captions in just a few clicks. -Buffer
These sound pretty good, so I tried them out:
Use an angry darth vader voice to convince people to pay to post on social mediaAnd this was the output:
Join the Dark Side of Social Media: Let Darth Vader Show...Join the dark side and unleash your potential! Just like Darth Vader commands attention, paying to post on social media give syour content the power it desreves. Don't let your voice be silenced -- invest in your reach! #SocialMediaPower #DarthVader #BoostYourPostsYup, that's slop.
Who is using this kind of stuff?
The marketing is clearly aimed at social media manager types who have been tasked with "growing our following" or LinkedIn denizens who are convinced they need a newsletter with lots of content to get their next job.
Slop is a boon to content marketers; slop can easily boost content and engagement numbers because most metrics aren't too sensitive to the quality of the interaction: views, likes, sheer number of posts can look good on a quarterly report. But while social media manager produced slop is annoying, it's not what really gets me. It's pretty easy to tune out. Where it gets more frustrating is the individuals who are producing slop.
The labor theory of value on social media
Haha maybe that’s why it stands out — I tend to think a bit more deeply before replying. I don’t rush my answers because I want them to have substance and meaning. But noted! I’ll work on making it sound a bit more natural. Thanks for the observation
It's frustrating to read slop comments because it feels like they will just keep coming endlessly. Whatever response I write will be greeted with breezy vapid positivity. I want to know that the person I'm talking with online put some effort into their post/comment.
But this is troubling: why should I care how much effort was put into it? A novel written in a few months is not necessarily less interesting than a novel that took an author's whole life. The amount of effort (how would we even measure such a thing?) behind a post is a horrible metric for determining whether something is worth reading.
Let's go back to the junk food analogy: slop is like food that looks good and nutritious, but turns out to be cardboard and sawdust once you start chewing on it -- what's worse: once you take a bite, you can't even spit it back out. You've already wasted your time.
The amount of effort may not be important, but the intellectual payoff I get for doing all that chewing is. Slop is tiring out my jaws.
What to do with the slop poster?
When the medium was expensive, the message was under greater pressure to be valuable -- someone had to take a risk to get the message in front of an audience. Now, very little risk is required.
From public health journals to scifi magazines to crappy ebooks on Amazon, slop posters are flooding every publicly available publishing outlet.
Filters and human moderation can only do so much here. Slop is produced much faster than moderators can review it and filters are too easily gamed -- it's like using a ruler to measure itself. It always ends up being a game of catch-up. There needs to be a cost to post.
Make them pay (to post)
You have to pay to post on Stacker News. Sure, we still see slop here, but my recent adventures in other forums have shown me how bad it can get. It's nothing like that here. But neither do we have moderators who are working to remove it. Paying to post fixes AI slop.
So the real question is: what is stopping the rest of the internet from moving towards pay to post?