I remember the first time I had split pea soup as a kid.
The bowl in front of me looked like green slop. It's still the most unappetizing thing I remember having to eat growing up. We visited family friends and my Mom made me sit there until I consumed every last drop.
My fellow Philadelphia Phillies fan,
, argues that the internet has become overrun with slop — content created solely for optimization and engagement metrics rather than genuine creativity or interest.In Make The Internet Fun Again he said:
Optimization is slowly killing the internet. You can see it most clearly on X, because tweets are the simplest content to make, and because likes are the fastest form of feedback. There, slop has taken over. Slop is the newly popular term for the garbage you see in tweets, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, and websites more broadly that is so superficial, mediocre, and banal that the only reason people could possibly create it is to drive some metric they’re optimizing for: likes, views, clicks, whatever.
Substack is the anti-slop forum.
A lifejacket to save writers and thinkers from drowning in green pea soup. The current state of the internet is over-optimized. People have gamed algorithms to death and clever tricks don't work anymore. The good news is everyone feels the pain and is hungry for something new.
Disruption is closer than I thought.