Definition: Algo slop
content you did not actively choose to follow, but which an algorithm keeps pushing into your feed because it resembles something you previously watched, liked, clicked on or reacted to, often until your timeline becomes a repetitive, distorted version of your interests.
We all know about AI slop: the bad, awful, generic and just not very interesting content being produced with the various AI tools out there.
But our timelines are now filled with something else too: algo slop.
As we started connecting with more people online, the flood — the torrent, the sheer stream of content coming through our timelines — became too much. So algorithms started filtering it. They decided what we would see, based on who we interacted with and what we’d previously liked, clicked on or reacted to.
As more and more content came in, the algorithm chose more and more of what we saw.
Then, of course, companies realised that content didn’t have to come from our friends for us to engage with it. And content that gets a reaction — positive or negative — is useful because engagement gives them more opportunities to serve crap ads into your timeline.
So now you like one video of a duck doing something funny.
Here’s a duck.
Here’s another duck.
Here’s a duck with a hat.
I think you’d like this video of more ducks quacking away.
Oh look, here’s another little duck.
Now there’s a racist guy with a duck talking about how much he likes his duck.
Now somebody is calling out the racist guy with the duck for being a racist.
Now you’ve got more racists in your timeline.
Now you’ve got even more racists in your timeline.
Now you’ve got right-wing shite in your timeline.
And this is algo slop.
This is what our timelines have become.
I’ve found myself going back to email and subscribing to more newsletters because at least there I am subscribing to the content I actually want. Which, I guess, is part of where Substack comes in.
Except Substack is now pushing things at us based on algorithms too: suggested subscriptions, recommended writers, things it thinks we might like.
And now my inbox is starting to jam up with all the newsletters I’ve subscribed to.
So I’m unsubscribing from things I was genuinely interested in because there is simply too much information coming into my inbox.
Remember when we subscribed to feeds and had feed readers?
I tried going back to that a while ago too. But even that becomes very busy because a lot of websites are now pumping out huge amounts of content because they’re also trying to win our attention in the stream, the torrent, the flood of information.
It seems to be a constant battle.
We moved from choosing what we followed, to algorithms choosing what we saw, to trying to escape the algorithms by subscribing directly again and then discovering that the direct subscriptions can become another flood of their own. Shit.