The internet is awash with slop
That’s a new category of online material. It’s cheap. It’s nasty. It’s made with AI.
That’s basically the Oxford University Press definition. Slop is shared ‘in an indiscriminate or intrusive way’ and is ‘low quality, inauthentic, or inaccurate’.
A tide of slop has oozed across the internet, taking over feeds and the mind of your reader. And it challenges the conventional wisdom of how to write online.
Slop defies the old rules
When accounts pour swill onto social media and search engines, they aren’t trying to identify an ideal reader, change their behaviour, or add value to their lives. They’re after a little attention from a million viewers.
To get that, the purveyors of slop will use lists, keywords, promises, and superlatives. They’ll hop on trends and drop names. They’ll court controversy and stoke outrage.
Most of all, they’ll churn it out. The sloppy way of writing is to pump out vast quantities of words with no quality control.
Our advice to you: do the opposite
That means saying something of substance: a thought-leadership piece that’s backed by research; an in-depth guide comparing services; an expert analysis of an industry event.
That kind of writing will make your reader think. And you shouldn’t be shy about demanding effort on their part. They want to use their grey matter.
That’s our big prediction for the year
Readers will seek out challenging writing.
Because, yes, we’ve seen stats about declining attention spans and reading ages… yes, we’ve picked up on commentors predicting a post-literate age… but we’ve also sensed a reaction to these trends.
People feel lousy about their reading habits
One reason ‘slop’ has been on our minds is because it was shortlisted for the Oxford Word of the Year.
The winner was ‘brain rot’, which explains how a media diet of junk is making readers feel.
Brain rot sets in when a person binges on social media. The mind atrophies, because it’s allowed to gaze at flashy blaring videos, or fake sickly-sweet photos, or generic feel-good mantras. It’s distracted all the time. It does anything other than think.
‘Brain rot’ gives us a way to talk about the damage slop is causing. And awareness is spreading. People’s use of the term tripled in 2024. You could say that in 2024 society gave itself a diagnosis. In 2025, it will go looking for a cure.
You can prepare for that counter-movement by putting yourself firmly on the side of the healers. Stop the slop and give your reader a way to improve their wordy diet.
Four ways to add substance to your work
Be like the beauty bloggers who picked Substack over TikTok, and who are using subscription services to have in-depth discussions with die-hard fans. They’re making the opposite of ‘low quality, inauthentic, or inaccurate’ content. As should you – if you want to appeal to readers (and Google’s AI-infused search engine).
Here's how to choose substance over slop in 2025:
- Conduct original research. Share insights from your work and organisation – or survey the wider world. If you have a following of industry professional or a customer base that represent a sector, throw some questions their way. The answers will give you a source of information that hasn’t been digested by AI.
- Share more of yourself. Why should your reader listen to you? What’s your record of success? How does your background inform the way you work? When you share something of yourself, you share something that can’t be coughed up by machines.
- Speak to your niche. Slop is generic mush. It speaks to the lowest common denominator. How can you write for the highest uncommon denominator – a narrow audience that few people understand?
- Go slow. Do clients work with you because you’re trendy? Maybe if you’re in music, fashion, advertising or design. Outside of those fields, being ahead of viral trends isn’t much of a qualification. So let the internet have its fun without you. Concentrate on the big, important, slow-moving problems that your actual audience wants to solve.
P.S. We have lots more thoughts about AI and how it should be used. Learn how to pair machine intelligence with your human heart and mind.
