Ask Lemmy

Pretty much the entirety of advertising always has been, especially since the fall of the fairness doctrine. With the rare exception of ad agencies that are making artworks to try and win awards once in a while.

In art, this fellow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kinkade

It's the only Wiki entry on an artist that I've seen with no examples of his work. The nearest is a photo of a photo of Kinkade with one of his paintings.

I'm not being snobbish - it does give me the same vibe as AI generated images touted as art. Nostalgia, colour saturation, cliché, all dialled up to the max. The man died in 2012 but lives on as a brand.

Marvel movies

Every annual-ized video game. 2K, Fifa, Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed. Copy and paste, low effort trash that offers nothing new, different, or interesting. They're designed to be as bland and disposible as possible, to keep you addicted for a year and selling you loot boxes and additions until the next edition comes out.

Fast fashion.

Anything found on aliexpress, temu or wish. Manufactured trash/industrial runoff that's likely dangerous to breathe near.

Television news. In fact, most of the shit on television these days.

The idea cancer for toddlers section of youtube, which I think they have since cleaned up. The "finger family pregnant elsa kills hitler spiderman" era. Which was kind of fascinating to study, because no one was in charge. iPad children weren't making decisions, they were just letting the colors and sounds happen, and actual people deciding to make the content, sometimes to the point of wearing costumes and shooting live video, were making what the algorithm deemed popular. At least one woman pulled a bright blue dress over a fake baby belly while her husband scribbled a toothbrush mustache on a Spiderman mask and didn't think "What the hell are we even doing right now?"

Art pieces that are made and sold as little more than money laundering schemes. Playing GTAO again and am kinda surprised out of all the money laundering operations you can run, a bogus art gallery isn't one of them.

Reaction videos - prime example of slop. WHO DAFUQ WATCHES THESE? Like, am I going crazy by not getting this? Why would I watch some person just sit there and react to shit, often exaggerating their reaction to get attention of a watcher, that brings literally 0 fucking worth to the original content?

Prank videos - only are second to reaction videos. 99% of the time are either fake or they do some questionable stuff to expectorating bystanders.

low effort, low quality, for making money because of it. Might not have either low effort or quality "tag" at times, but then its replaced by being harmful, which can be there with them too. So things like what fastfood companies squeeze out, tiktok content, illegal drugs, temu trash.

So maybe also anything that actively exploits humans in some way for monetary gains (ai exploits and harms creators, fastfood and drugs exploit and harm body, tiktok trash exploits and harms mind, temu trash exploits western economy and harms environment).

so in short, shit that would make world better place with its absence

shorts, ads, fast food

Short form video comedy with cringy facial expressions synced to music is my most hated example

YouTube channels that are mostly just reading Reddit comments.

Those garbage/misleading mobile games in ads

The "cooking blog" style where a simple answer to a simple question has to be padded with eight paragraphs of garbage. Like, I just want to know how to put a comment in a YAML file. I don't need a table of contents for this, I don't need to hear a brief history of how the comment was invented, just tell me the character to type.

"Silverberg's Law"

Someone once asked science fiction writer Robert Silverberg why 90% of the SF stories they read were crap.

Silverberg replied that 90% of everything is crap.

Recipe websites.

Any trump speech.

• Super Hero movies

• almost anything Disney produces these days.

SEO slop is the first thing that comes to mind. It's super-charged in ubiquity with AI now, but it's been a thing about as long as search engines.

Sometimes you land on a page and you can tell you're only there because they loaded it with keywords, repeating the same phrases you searched for in every variation.

The absolute epitome of non-AI slop has got to be these creepy videos that were on YouTube back in ~2017:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

Its exactly the kind of thing you'd expect would be the product of AI, but it actually came before AI. I think a lot of it was procedurally generated though, using scripts to control 3D software and editing software, so different character models could be used in the same scenes and different scenes could be strung together to make each video.

I think a similar thing happens with those shovelware Android games. There's so many that are just the same game with (incredibly poorly done) asset swaps that I think they must just make a game once and then automatically generate a thousand+ variations on it.

100 years of video advertising. Here let me rub this on your eyeballs.

fast food...

at this point can you even call that meat?

DropShipping. Basicly everything made in China

If we want to really strech it: plastic. We should have never invented plastic. The world would be a better one

Background music for all advertising during the holiday seasjinglejinglejingle jazzybellsbellsbellsbells BING BANG BONG BING DING DANG DONG although I suspect this is increasingly AI slop at this point

Ghostwritten sequels to series whose original author is dead.

Most phone apps, a lot of modern software, SEO bullshit, the current web, virtually every show, the vast majority of Hollywood films, a lot of the music that makes it to the charts, influencers' "content", adverts, the overwhelming pile of crap that no one buys on Steam, lots of AAA games that too many people buy on steam, the poorly-written bottom of the barrel fanfiction that passes as books, and a depressing amount of stuff posted on social media, including this comment.

Yes, I am grumpy today, why do you ask?

Temu dollar garbage. Especially 3D printed stuff

Amazon. It's a gigantic warehouse of slop

Shovelware video games could be included in the slop category.

Hallmark Christmas movies are proto-slop. Same goes for Lifetime Original movies. Example with Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig, literally doesn't feel real.

• Funko pops
• those Hong Kong ninja movies from the 80s that mixed chinese movies and ninja scenes
• food that lost all taste and is basically salt, sugar, water and/or fat
• any movie franchise or TV show that has a 37th sequel or season
• The Loudness War in music
• Fast Fashion

Liberty Mutual’s commercials are utter non-sense, no plot, not funny.

Please make them stop the slop.