Measures and countermeasures
#1 From today’s morning reading:
X’s Head of Product Says iMessage, Gmail, and Phone Calls Will Collapse Within 90 Days.
“The economic model that has held the internet together for thirty years is failing. The deal was straightforward:
“Humans wrote articles, built blogs, published analyses, and Google indexed them. Readers clicked. Creators earned advertising revenue. Everyone got something useful. But Google introduced AI Overviews, which synthesize answers directly at the top of the search results page. You get your answer without clicking. Publishers stop receiving traffic. Several major media properties have reported organic audience declines of more than 50 percent over three years. Entire editorial teams have been cut to a fraction of their former size. Blogs that ran for fifteen years have shut down. And into the vacancy left by departing human publishers, SEO slop floods in: AI-generated content mills publishing hundreds of articles per day, optimized enough to rank, thin enough to be worthless, monetized by the same advertising ecosystem that used to reward quality. Merriam-Webster chose slop as its word of the year for 2025. The English language found the right word.”
An excellent summation of what has occurred. After reading the headline and how he says there is no way to fight all this instant, targeted slop creation, I thought to myself, “what would happen if we ‘just let it all fail.’ Can we engineer a tracking system that is also capable of executing a reverse denial of service attack?
Every measure has a countermeasure. It’s time for the countermeasures to come first.
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#2 Sooey!
Personal observation: I am tired of hearing about the “slop.”
I wanted to examine multiple sources to find their defintions of the word. So I did a broad search:
definition of slop
The first thing I noticed was the number of returns for the word slope either on its own as a redirect or included in the summary navigation box in the definition of ‘slop.’
This kind of prompt rewriting has also gotten out of control.
If you found defintions that have not yet included the sense of being related to the digital world (most still don’t), you will notice the definitions don’t seem useful for that purpose. Merriam-Webster, the self-proclaimed king of the language, has made ‘slop’ its “2025 word of the year.” The digital sense is listed as the primary sense. The Collins dictionary has it listed third.
Let’s cut the slop and go with a much better, more accurate choice for the purpose, the word I have been using throughout my writing: dreck.
Pass it on.