For the past few weeks, I’ve been producing slop. Not because I want to. Merely because everyone tells me I must in order to succeed on the internet.

Content slop is a strange term, but it describes the mass-produced, often AI-generated, surface-level content that constitutes a large portion of the internet now. It has three characteristics, but I stick to Ryan Broderick’s first outlining feature, which states that “to the user, the viewer, the customer, it feels worthless.”

Anything made purely for internet points and offering no value whatsoever is slop. It constitutes a massive portion of YouTube, streaming apps, social media platforms, and unfortunately, a large portion of the web now. So why have I been creating it, you might ask? Well, because I wanted some of those sweet dopamine hits everyone craves, of course. While working to increase the level of my Instagram account after deleting it a couple of years ago, it’s tough going, and every bit of advice on how to grow your account suggests you publish reels. So I began hating myself and producing slop.

I couldn’t do it to myself for very long. Barely a few weeks of publishing meme-like reels led to thousands of views and loads of likes, which for some would be a considerable win. Yet, the metric I wanted to push, my follower count, barely moved. Views are worthless unless they lead to something: buying your product, visiting your links, or perhaps following your account. The percentage of people who take such actions is so minute that the old tricks do not work any more.

Platforms like TikTok and Instagram only serve those who produce entertainment. They exist for no other reason than to serve you slop interlaced with adverts and keep you watching. They are self-serving companies that care about the creators only as much as they need to. Not only that, but they have a way of convincing us that they care about creators when, in fact, the only metric that matters is slop production. As long as you produce slop that can be served to other people, they can keep making money.

Granted, my slop experiment wasn’t done to the best of my abilities; my slop was particularly poor slop. Mosseri, head of Instagram, stated himself that you’re not entitled to exposure and reach; you just need to produce different slop. Had I offered a bit more value to people, perhaps they would have followed me for more slop production, but I doubt it. I realised rapidly that modern social algorithms have removed the need to follow anyone to see the slop that resonates with you. So there’s no point in bothering after all.