The internet was already slop

Remember Elsagate? Remember when the Facebook newsfeed undermined democracy? Remember needing to add "reddit" to Google searches? Remember advertorials, Taboola, Outbrain? Bots, Twitter and beyond? SEO and content farms?

All of this noise was human powered, because humans were all we had at the time.

Before LLMs, platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Google, et al):

• extracted labor and captured its value
• manipulated and funneled attention towards profit
• privileged low-quality, harmful, and engagement-optimized content
• made the personal web increasingly inaccessible

….and most of this is still true today.

So it's weird the current discourse treats slop as an LLM-induced crisis rather than a continuation of the dynamics that already shaped the internet (Slop Evader, Slop Tax, Lost in the slop layer). Or it fixates on the aesthetic failures of LLM output while ignoring the structures that shape it (Coca-Cola's recent AI holiday ad).

Maybe we just accepted that platforms define the physics of our digital world, as long as we get to gawk at the wrong number of fingers?

Or maybe we enjoy simple narratives that travel well. You know, slop.