If you are a Twitter user, one of the things you may have noticed is that the site is increasingly difficult to use as intended. The “slop accounts” fill the site with posts intended to game the payment system. It is also infested with “influencers” who, like the slop accounts, seek to gain attention, but instead of doing it for money, they do it for the “clout.” As a result, many popular accounts have reduced their activity on the site, which magnifies the problem.
This is not just a Twitter issue. YouTube suffers from the same problem as artificial intelligence makes it easier for slop merchants to churn out content. They use AI to create a slideshow and voiceover about a topic. It is not a video in the conventional sense, but it is close enough for their purposes. If you watch a video on your favorite historical figure, you will be flooded with artificial intelligence slop videos in your recommended feed. If you are not careful, you end up awash in these slop videos.
Like the slop on Twitter, the slop on YouTube is mostly about gaming the payment system, and most of it originates from India. Even a small amount of money from slop farming goes a long way in a land without indoor toilets. The advance of artificial intelligence might end Indian call centers and coding shops, but it will come with the proliferation of Indian slop centers. The big social media platforms will be swamped by this content unless they figure out how to stop it.
The Google search engine experience suggests it is unlikely that the big social platforms will effectively combat the slop. For the most part, Google is a useless search engine now because they had to implement so many filters to combat the scammers, that the outputs often make little sense. The reason they had to do this was the scammers were finding ways to get their scams at the top of search results, rather than the legitimate results.
It was not helped by Google’s attempt to ban unapproved opinions during the latest spasm of progressive madness. Ironically, you now need artificial intelligence to find things you used to use Google to find. The Brave browser search engine now provides an AI answer at the top of the search results. Most of the time, the AI response is close enough, unless the question is on the list of banned ideas. Even AI has been rigged by our progressive theocrats.
It is not just Indian scammers that are ruining the public square. A strange phenomenon on YouTube is the reaction video. Video makers with no talent create videos of themselves reacting to other videos. They make goofy faces and add inane commentary to reach the required length to monetize the video. The point is to attract the attention of people interested in the primary content. It is a way to exploit the fair use doctrine to steal the work of others for private gain.
Now that reaction videos have proven successful, a new genre has emerged where the YouTuber makes a reaction video to a reaction video. Suppose a home cook makes a recipe video, and a professional chef then makes a reaction video to it. The new “reaction to the reaction” YouTuber then makes a reaction video to the chef reacting to the original video. It is not hard to see where this is heading. It will not be long before it is reaction videos all the way down.
All of this relies on systemic theft. The Twitter slop merchants steal content like images and videos and then use it in their slop posts. If you are at a public event and video something amusing to post online, you can be sure that an Indian slop farmer will steal it, remove any references to you, and then add it to their slop stream. This is why so many video clips now have highly intrusive watermarks. It is an effort to combat the Indian slop farmers.
Ironically, the deluge of slop that promise to swamp the internet was made possible by what made social media possible. The big platforms made their billions stealing information from their users and then selling it to marketing firms and governments. Free email was about harvesting the user’s private correspondence. Your search and browsing history were used without your permission. Big tech ushered in the collapse of personal property, and now they are the victims of the same theft.
The bigger problem is the tragedy of the commons. The internet is the largest public common in human history. While it is not entirely free to access, it is effectively free to use. The Indian scammer does not have to pay for each scam text message he sends to your grandmother. He does not have to pay for each slop tweet he posts on Twitter. The cost to him as a scammer is the same as for you and every other person accessing the digital public common.
The infrastructure providers have an interest in their part of the internet, but they do not have a stake in the public square. The social media firms have an interest in their piece of the common, but their reason to exist is as an open forum for all to enter, so walling it off is against their interests. The public square portion of the digital commons is like an orchard owned in common. Everyone has a reason to take from it, but no one has a reason to protect it.
We will probably end up with a private internet for the same reason we have gated communities, concierge healthcare, and homeowner associations. The open society benefits only those with no stake in it. They take what they want and then move on to the next host. The only defense is the closed society in which admission is determined by private interests. The great democratization of the public square will end with a great feudalization of it.
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