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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 week ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Ah yes, Nazis, well known for using slop jar to mean the vessel into which chamber pots are poured, in 1855

[–] TrashGoblin@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

"Slop" as we use it to describe AI outputs came into the discourse via left-wing twitter and podcasts using "slop" as a term for mass entertainment media (like Marvel movies — cape slop). Used negatively but also self deprecatingly: I can't wait for the new episode of "Stranger Things", because I need my slop. The explicit metaphor is pigs happily eating buckets of food waste from a trough. It's just slop. Nothing nefarious.

[–] Hypnosifl@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think this may have been a case of the "dirtbag left" types using slang that originated on 4chan, I did a search with date restrictions on the 4plebs archive site and found posts using it for mindless entertainment going back to 2012 at least

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Here's an example from an 1897 book review I found in the google books corpus: "There never was anything in all this world quite so provincial as American literature. When we over here are not reading slop we read the books that bear the approval of London." Or this doggerel from the October 1920 issue of Farm Journal: "I read all kinds of printed junk / the good, the noble and the punk / the ancient and the new / and men who see me reading slop / predict that if I do not stop / my head will go askew."

These both seem like wiktionary's current sense 8 ("Content or entertainment which is worthless, or produced and consumed mindlessly"), so I don't see any need to credit 4chan or 21st-century anti-Semites in general.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73708#comment-1642217

[–] Hypnosifl@awful.systems 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Searching google books for "reading slop", this usage seems to be very sporadic (only 11 hits for 20th century publications), I'd think it was more just a case of independently coming up with the same shorthand rather than causal influence, whereas slop seems to have been used this way frequently enough on 4chan that it seems much more likely there was an actual chain of influence to later use on twitter and elsewhere, especially since a lot of other 4chan slang has later broken out in that way.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 1 points 6 hours ago

Or there was less occasion for a term for this particular kind of bad? Correlation, causation, etc.

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 2 points 1 day ago

Sadly I think the popularization does owe a lot to the intermediate stage where 4chan started calling mass entertainment media "goyslop," but even the Protocols types switched to tacking on specific descriptors before it made it out into the mainstream and got picked up as a term for genAI output.