Why we cannot have good things as a community.

2026 Day 185. #PersonalDays.

Monetising your content has been the main object of many creators. Thye have seen others do it successfully before them, and they want to replicate the lifestyle, the success, and the money. They are not necessarily looking for the same things but they align themselves with a path that they believe will lead to success.

This fills the stream with the exact same idea (or trends) and everyone looks to the same thing. Here in lies the problem.

When you are the first person to do something, you are inventing a new space. This could be a business you started, a 20 second AI slop, a 10 second UGC content, a blog, anything. As this new space grows, you attract people who are followers and are amazed by your content and people who are amazed by your success.

While luck was a big part of your success, a major driving force was the fact that you brought something on that the world had not seen before. So you not created a product but also created a market and had a virtual monopoly over it.

The get-rich-quick side of humans decide to replicate your work and do at least as good as you. Soon, they flood the free market with slightly altered versions of your product. So much of it is created that now the market sits extremely bifurcated and everyone gets a piece of the slice so small that it is barely worth having.

Eventually people realise that content is so commoditised that there is nothing left for them unless they rack more views than the normal person.

So what happens now?

  • cheap tactics
  • automations / bot farms
  • inorganic traffic boosting

So a person might suddenly appear a little too much.

Then they also push their content with paid tools (the “sponsored” posts), and appear everywhere.

At this stage the platform is polluted and should probably be written off.

We all have seen the bad AI videos, no-face-video accounts, summarisations, clippings, etc. These are the finest examples of a platform infected with slop.

Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash

Whether platforms should do away with these or not is a discussion for another time.

If we look around, people are engaging with all this but they learn nothing. It provides no value to anyone anymore, so how is the profit coming in?

Suppose you made a short indie film and you want to promote it.

In this era you simply, give the entire film to clippers, they take out the viral moments, caption them and fill their bot accounts with them linking to your content on YouTube, Vimeo or elsewhere.

With so much content being pushed out, people are bound to come across it via one account or another. The clip contains moments that excite the person, possibly a cliffhanger, that sparks the curiosity.

Now the smaller dopamine hit from the clip is not enough. They are now curious an engaged. Your marketing campaign is successful.

Do you imagine the amount of content that was pushed around to make this work?

With platform approved ads you publish one piece of content and push it to people. Here you are crowding the algorithm with the same content, views are mistaken for engagement and these are pushed to everyone. Same result, different paths.

One costs you a lot more money than the other, one pollutes the platform while one makes the platform some money.

Another way is how Reddit has been infected. A text based platform which was StackOverFlow for the open world.

Suddenly everyone have become a little too helpful in guiding you or finding similar mistakes. One would assume this is because of more engagement on Reddit.

Turns out someone had the brilliant of providing a teaser or the possibility of a solution. If you would engage with it, it turns out the solution is their own SaaS.

With LLMs, vibe coding has come up which AI generated slop for the software industry. People are creating and recreating ideas and nobody is buying them. The only places that currently stay winning are the hosting platforms that charge the most minimal fee to host your product, often because of the limited engagement that it is going to receive.

And thus, Reddit is now filling up slop too because people want to sell to more and reach more people. Everybody is a creator or a developer and will destroy good practices and ideas to market themselves or the product.

Greed destroys culture. It kills whatever has existed and then invites more. the weed in your garden that kills your favourite flower and then proceed to destroy the rest.

Some people then make money selling off the greedy way to even greedier people. Then the greed economy destroys the platform of legitimate course creators. The destruction of your public platform is inevitable.

This has even happened with Medium and AI generated writing. People wrote articles with AI, bought the premium membership, and then used bot accounts to get views and earn money off of it.

Maybe I should not pour all my feelings on the internet. Enough writing for today.

See you tomorrow.