Cultivate disgust

This is the novel element of my technique. Disgust is a highly motivating emotion.

Try to mentally frame slop engagement as a disgusting thing. You should find it disgusting that people want you to consume slop, and disgusting that you'd allow them to get what they want. This is not difficult, as both positions are natural outcomes of understanding why slop exists and why we're drawn to it.

Try to be, though this is difficult as it's contrary to its goals, mindful of your slop consumption. Actively consider the user experience, and the content you're seeing, instead of falling into a trance. Try to catch the feelings that lead you to slop, and the ones associated with scrolling. How does it make you feel? How do you feel after a session? Do you feel better for that? Relaxed? Entertained? Enriched in any way? Was it... good?

Why slop exists

Brad Troemel made a very good video essay^[1] which covers this well, tracing the phenomenon from central banking responses to the 2008 financial crisis.

I'll summarise parts here. Slop is a result of the logic of venture capital and, later, public companies' duty to shareholders. Venture capital investment strategy is predicated on many failures and few, very successful, successes. This led to a growth strategy called "Blitzscaling", enabled by the cheap money which central bank responses to the crisis provided. Startups sought to grow and capture market share quickly via subsidisation, and then, once near-monopoly was secured, become profitable.

This is why the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy of the 2010s existed. Cheap subscriptions, cheap Uber rides, cheap trial periods, delivery-fee-free food couriering. But eventually interest rates had to rise, and money became expensive again. By this time Uber, Netflix, Spotify et al. held strong market positions, and VC investors and post-IPO shareholders were demanding returns. So, enshittification^[2] began as an autocannibalistic means of providing them.

This is why Netflix is now full of ads and second-screen-friendly slop. Why the pushback on account sharing exists. Why Spotify is increasingly expensive and keeps trying to push royalty-free AI slop on you. Why Uber is at least as expensive as any other taxi. Why Google search results blow ass^[3], and why people have wistful memories of 2010s YouTube. The only thing constraining extraction is the degree to which consumers feel they can leave, and between platform lock-in and the market concentration created by Blitzscaling, that degree tends to be low. It feels like there's nowhere else to go online now. As if the inexhaustible-feeling variety, strangeness, creativity and wonder of the 2000s internet has disappeared. It has not.

The increasingly obviously non-democratic nature of algorithmic feeds exacerbates feelings of captivity and passivity. Content recommendation used to feel relatively user-driven, as if we were served things other people enjoyed, but manipulation has become flagrant enough that our feeds are obviously inorganic. Instead, it feels like platform owners are filling the trough with what they want you to be watching. The non-neutrality of platforms and algorithms has become blatant.

Some might look at this more charitably, and interpret slop as an unintended side-effect of myopic optimisation for engagement. But this interpretation would lead to an equally naive view of enshittification. Both are optimising for logically sensible goals in context of the systems they operate in, and both worsen outcomes for everyone and everything except capital. Both are examples of market logic being treated as a natural law which must, where it conflicts with social good, trample it. Whether you believe it to be due to helpless complicity or callous disregard is largely semantic, outside of our efforts towards disgustmaxxing. Either way, moral responsibility is being overridden by the dictates of markets, and our feeds overrun with slop.

Similar logic reaches across the entire economy. Superhero movies and nostalgia reboots have near-zero artistic merit, but they're assured to be low-risk, hog-approved investments. Academia has become increasingly concerned with extraction over education, and AI-generated papers keep appearing. Even state power has incorporated the logic of enshittification^[4].

Creator involvement

Creator platforms are far from neutral. They have an incentive to influence what is created, in order to maximise advertiser income. This is achieved by their enforcement of an opinionated meta, instrumented via recommendation algorithms and creator reward programmes.

When the YouTube reward programme switched from payments based on view counts to viewing length, it rewrote that meta. Hence the current popularity of overlong video essay slop and paucity of short content - this is what killed 2010s YouTube. These things strongly affect what's created (and what you see). Unless there's a coincidence of wants between the meta and their own goals, creators are unable to gain an audience for the content they actually want to make.

The frenzy at the trough attracts plenty of money-driven creators to YouTube, but even well-intentioned ones struggle to avoid having their work tainted and distorted to some degree. This is why YouTube thumbnails are... the way they are. And you WON'T BELIEVE what happened when THIS AFFECTED TITLES. But worse, it bleeds into content itself. With annoying hooks, padding to ten-minute runtimes for algorithmic ad revenue rewards, jarring flow due to re-engagement peaks, consistently-disappointing delayed curiosity payoffs to extend your watch time, "Don't forget to like, subscribe and hit the bell", comment bait via artificial questions, deliberate mistakes, or the almost-quaint "Comment where you're watching from!"

YouTube kids' content provides perhaps the starkest examples of what happens when utterly cynical content creators start playing the meta^[5].

So you're getting slop foisted on you from both sides. Platforms have built this horrible machine, and creators, having little alternative, must operate inside it and either service its dictates, or accept a relative lack of engagement and income. At best, they can try to ease the pressure by appealing to Patreon.

This is why the hog analogy is so apt. It describes not only the low value of slop content and how scrollers passively consume and relate to it, but implies a farmer who installed the trough, keeps it full, and profits from their livestock's naive slop-swilling.

Why you are a slop-loving hog

What is it that appeals about slop? We know that it's trash, almost entirely devoid of meaning or value. We know that, while it's highly engaging, it's also highly unsatisfying. That queasy, jarring feeling of simultaneous overstimulation and unalleviated boredom after a session is widely observed. So why do we keep returning to the trough?

Tristan Harris's post How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind gives a good summary of the psychology which is leveraged by UX designers to achieve platform engagement in general. I will avoid being exhaustive here.

Variable-ratio reinforcement schedules

I had AI make this, and look how awful it is. Like all those anti-scrolling TikTok and Reels videos, it's slop about slop. Perfect.

This underlies the most fundamental dark design pattern involved in infinite scrolling, and is called out a lot^[6][7]. B.F. Skinner put rats and pigeons in little boxes, and rewarded them for desirable responses to stimuli according to various schedules. Variable-ratio reinforcement was the schedule under which the desired behaviour was most frequently performed, and the one under which it would be continued for the longest time without reinforcement.

It's the same operant conditioning mechanism by which slot machines are addictive. You pull the lever, and you might get a reward, or you might not. This is exciting. You might get something you like next! Every scroll is a little thrill. It's like opening a bottomless crate of mystery boxes. Even when there's little reinforcement, because most of this is slop, you'll keep at it. Because what if the next pull isn't slop? Exciting!

This is also why you impulsively unlock your phone to check your notifications, or find it in your hand without really knowing why. And why posting is so engaging - will you receive likes, or not?

Finally, this gives us another way in which slop-filled feeds are an outcome of enshittification. Scrolling providing more consistently good content (more continuous reinforcement) wouldn't serve the interests of platform owners, because continuous reinforcement schedules lead to lower response rates. You will view more content, and therefore more ads, if you're hunting for "good" content amongst slop.

It's not that variable-ratio reinforcement is awful and should be avoided entirely. It's that we should recognise it being used against our best interests. Slop scrolling is a particularly horrible Skinner box to get trapped in, and understanding how a trap works is helpful in avoiding it.

Overestimation of self-agency

Most people believe that they have a high degree of control over their behaviour, and thus fall prey to restraint bias. The idea that their behaviour could be manipulated against their best interests, without their conscious awareness, is scary, because they prize their perceived degree of agency. If I'm not strongly in control of my actions, then... there are unpleasant implications, and most people would really rather not entertain them.

That fear and aversion, combined with cognitive dissonance, allows this belief to persist even as it's repeatedly shown to be ridiculous. How many times have you accidentally spent far longer than intended scrolling? Aimed to reduce your screen time, and utterly failed? Yet the idea that your will could be subverted so easily and consistently by a silly little app still feels ridiculous. It isn't, and you already have all the evidence of that you need.

This is a large part of why things like screen time limits, the analogue bag trend, YouTube videos about how to reduce screen time and "Ten things to do instead of doom scrolling" are popular despite their ineffectiveness. They serve the belief that you are, despite your creaking shelfful of "Won't get fooled again" awards, a strong agent.

Escape and avoidance

Many memes like this exist. Part of being human is experiencing unpleasant emotional states, and we do not like it.

It's easy to reach the conclusion that scrolling satisfies a need, because this is generally the case for things you feel motivated to do. But I don't think that's what's happening. If it was then you'd feel better afterwards. Instead, scrolling is a dangerously easy means of distracting oneself from undesirable emotional states. This is part of why, when you eventually stop, you usually feel worse. It's ultimately harmful but does provide a reprieve. This is a striking commonality with the logic of harmful yet persistent substance abuse.

The problem is not seeking a reprieve sometimes. It's that scrolling is depleting rather than restorative, but is seductive because it's so easy to access, demands no effort, and provides a strongly dissociative trance. When we want distraction we tend to be in a vulnerable position, and scrolling predates on that.

Problems do arise, though, if we're seeking a reprieve all the time. Consistent experiential avoidance prevents us from taking any actions which might result in durable change (efforts to change our habits, beliefs, lifestyles), and long-term increases the frequency and intensity of the avoided experience.

Emotions which we allow to be experienced and processed rise, peak, and dissipate naturally. Avoidance stymies that process without changing one's underlying mental state. Further, you never obtain evidence that these internal states could have been tolerated and could have passed - there is no catharsis. Feeling unpleasant feelings becomes a very frightening thing which we are desperate to avoid, and avoidance itself exacerbates them.

Scrolling is also a wildly bad avoidance mechanism because algorithmic content is so frequently optimised for engagement by being negatively emotionally activating. You end up consuming material that makes you feel outraged and sad in your quest to escape from unpleasant emotional material, and you probably feel guilty for having done so.

Psychiatry (notably, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) is clear on exactly the opposite being a better approach. Leaning into, with acceptance, experience of unpleasant internal states, so that you can gain tolerance for them and trust in the natural arc of emotional processing. Meditation practice can work similarly.

Your brain on slop

Here, I'm going to discuss short-form content specifically. People tend to really like it, and this should be a sign that it is not good for you. While we want to avoid long-form slop principally because it's of low value, short-form slop is, as well as being of near-zero value, outright bad for you.

Meta-analysis finds association with poorer mental health, and with cognition, across attention, inhibitory control, language, memory and working memory^[8]. As the analysis says, this may be explained by the dual theory of habituation and sensitisation.

It's careful to impress that directionality remains unestablished, but we can look to subjective empiricism here. When's the last time you were able to sit through an entire movie, or read a book for a few hours, whether at all or without feeling the urge to check your phone? Has it always been that way?

Some may say that lazy, sweeping and usually-unsourced generalisations about "shrinking attention spans" are commonly made, and what's actually happening is that a type of attention is being trained, one that allows users to rapidly triage whether they want to engage with content. But what is this form of attention good for, except sifting through torrents of slop? When what's being lost is the capacity for deep and rich engagement with things of value, this seems like a poor trade. Even if you can find something of worth in the trough, you no longer have the faculties to appreciate it.

Ensloppification can promote drawn-out filler content, or brain-frying short-form, or forms of man-made horror yet to be seen. There's short-form slop and essayslop, and also academiaslop, workslop, movieslop... Slop is not a format, but a cultural logic of the attention economy.

What is slop?

We can make sense of Troemel's^[1:1] answer now. Slop is the finished product of enshittification.

It is the result of maximally applying managerial principles to content creation, and thereby entirely discarding concern and responsibility for social, informational or artistic value. The sole optimisation target is engagement (which is, anyway, far easier to quantify).

It is technocapital's algorithmic fun-house mirror reflection of humanity. Art stripped of artistry. Education reduced to trivia. A mockery of the human spirit. A busted fibre-optic refraction of what we "want", through the most vulnerable and base zones of our psychology. Tech's most cynical realisation yet of capital's extractive tendencies. That's what's in the trough - peak innovation in self-debasement.

Some^[9] may be charitable, and say that it's not intentional. Following market logic, it's just what people want. That somehow feels even worse.

We should feel disgusted by our complicity.

A litany of disgust

• Slop is things working as intended
• Slop delivery mechanisms are intentionally designed to make you consume (more and more of) it
• You are conditioned by slop
• Slop is lobotomising you
• Slop is robbing you of the ability to appreciate non-slop
• Slop is impairing your ability to be present in your life
• Slop is stunting your emotional processing
• You are allowing all of this to happen
• And in doing so, you are pleasing and enriching big tech CEOs and shareholders

What is to be done?

Either accept your servitude as a craven slop-scroller in big tech's engagement mines, or leave sloppy platforms. What's really necessary is only to disengage from algorithmic feeds, and perhaps for people with more psychological fortitude than me there are viable compromise positions. But I am an utter hog and have continually proven to myself that it's all or nothing, and I don't really buy that you're not a hog too.

I know that less drastic measures sound more appealing. There's the promise of still being able to scroll a bit and, due to restraint bias, it feels like that could work. However, relying on willpower in moments of temptation is a losing strategy. Effective change tends to involve environmental restructuring, which asks far less of your restraint. It's far easier to not scroll at all than to moderate scrolling. Scrolling involves momentum and habit, and once habitual behaviour has been triggered, it consistently overrides intentions. Ask any recovering addict about what they learned from attempts at moderation.

Some people's livings and/or social lives are deeply tied to these platforms, and if that's the case... it doesn't change the binary available to you. It's just going to make leaving, if you choose to do so, a lot harder.

The tragedy of it is that there are still creators producing actually good things on the big non-short-form platforms. But how much of that do you actually see when you're engaging via algorithm? It's buried. There is a disincentive to serve you much of it via algorithm. Some will still make its way to you, the old-fashioned way, via personal recommendations, and probably it'll lead to more enjoyable consumption.

Short-form content is out entirely. It's pure slop. There is virtually nothing of value here. Cooking your brain while scrolling hundreds of items of slop is not worth those ultra-rare, slightly life-improving tidbits. I realise that it feels like you have actually learnt a lot of useful things (or if you're like me, magpied them into a saved list you never review and continued hunting for more), and that feeling is exactly what keeps you hooked. You may have learnt some useful things... at the opportunity cost of not learning many more, because you were busy slop-panning.

Cutover

When you have cultivated a healthy amount of disgust, motivation to change your consumption of algorithmic content should be strong. This makes it more likely that you'll be able to succeed. Now you should start to consider the environmental changes you can make.

Introduce friction, reduce tension

Create the amount of friction required, via a process of trial and error, for success. I suspect this will lead most people to the conclusion that moderation is not feasible, and that if they want out of slopworld they must disengage from feeds entirely. But that's probably something that must be arrived at oneself, so by all means follow a ladder of escalation if you're unconvinced.

• Application usage time limits, screen time reminders
• Application interruptors/blockers such as one sec, ScreenZen (both of which also have desktop options)
• Modded applications which allow the sloppiest feeds (e.g. Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts) to be disabled
  • These are usually closed source, which your security risk tolerance may not allow for
• Permanent greyscale mode
• ⚠️🤡 ENTERING MEGACOPE/"MORE CONSUMPTION CAN SAVE ME" ZONE
• Entrust someone else with your parental control PIN
• Get a second phone exclusively for this stuff
• Physical anti-distraction devices like Brick, Halo
• Buy a dumbphone. Things like getting into concerts or paying for parking often require an app nowadays, so have fun trying to participate in society.
  • Seek salvation in hyperconsumption. Buy several other devices to replicate the functionality of a $100 smartphone.
• 🧘🧠 EXITING TROUGH OF MEGACOPE, WISDOM GAINED
• Uninstall applications entirely
  • While you shouldn't intend to use them, web versions of platforms tend to have more UX friction/awkwardness and thus be less absorbing. They can also be blocked using apps, browser extensions.

On PCs, more control is available via browser extensions and userscripts. Unhook is a popular browser extension which can hide all YouTube feeds (homepage, comments, Shorts). Various userscripts can block site elements, like Instagram Reels. You may find that only using social media on your PC is manageable.

The idea of reducing tension applies to impulsive/compulsive phone usage in general. It's about trying to reduce the tension involved with checking, not having checked, or not having acted on calls to action (e.g. "reply to this message!") from one's phone. Turn off all non-DM notifications for any remaining slop apps. Turn off all the notifications you can for every app. Turn off read receipts for messaging applications.

Reattune to lower stimulation, gain comfort with boredom

Many people treat uncontrolled slop consumption as a discipline problem, and give advice like "build a morning routine", or "use a Pomodoro timer", "write a dopamine menu", "do breathing exercises first". But this is cope and doesn't work. At root it is not a discipline problem, but a problem of scrolling-exacerbated aversion to unpleasant internal states. Productivity porn cannot help you to recover from this. Self-work can. Self-work is hard and often unpleasant and people generally don't want to do it, and if that's you then okay, but understand that nothing is going to change. If you want to actually live, you must work towards having an examined, mindful life. One which you are actually present and engaged in. Apocryphal and cringe or not, "The unexamined life is not worth living".

Find some sort of low-energy, mind-numbing activity^[10]. Something you can do while lounging, that keeps your hands busy, and can be initiated instantly and impulsively. This will help to replace what scrolling does for you. I would suggest chain smoking hand-rolled cigarettes^[11].

Spend time each day doing nothing. Just stare at a wall. Start with ten minutes. This will probably be painful, and it being painful should bring into focus how fried you are. It is clearly not good for time spent without stimulation or distraction from one's thoughts to be so unpleasant. When discomfort arises, try not to do anything about it. Just notice it, stay with it, and see that you don't die and it doesn't last.

Use this insight to spur some sort of self-work. Anything. Journal about your self-concept, emotions and insecurities, as these things can only improve if drawn into the conscious mind and confronted. Make some art. Start a meditation practice. If you're really suffering with this, and perhaps anyway, you should seek therapy.

Purge

Outside of accounts you can trust yourself not to scroll on, and which are useful to retain (e.g. Facebook for events and marketplace), purge your posts and delete the account.

Thankfully I never got into Twitter and got sick of Facebook years ago. My thing was Reddit, which is a lot more embarrassing. You can use a script such as this to mass-edit posts, which I'd recommend over immediate deletion because it should result in greater loss from Reddit's database and search engine indexes. Wait a few months and run again with deletion if you want, then delete your account.

What's left of the web?

There's still more web out there. What just used to be called "the web", and has now fractured off into the indie web, or small web, is where people who are still down with the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, or just aren't as fried as everyone else, have escaped to. There are still many interesting, informative and weird personal websites and webrings, forums and IRC channels and so on. The internet Hypnospace Outlaw pays tribute to does still exist. It's a place where curation and signposting are very important, as search engines have become so degraded, though alternative and indie web search engines exist too. Take back curatorial control, become your own algorithm^[12].

Perhaps you'd like to join in? Try making your own site. It's fun, educational and highly rewarding.

Maybe it's not like it used to be, but it's still a vast improvement over slopworld. Enjoy exploring! Enjoy being able to explore! There's much more than you might expect outside of the big platforms, and it tends to be much more interesting to engage with.

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1. THE ZIRPSLOP REPORT, 2025, Brad Troemel ↩︎ ↩︎

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification ↩︎

3. The Man Who Killed Google Search, Ed Zitron ↩︎

4. The Enshittification of American Power, Henry Farrell & Abraham L. Newman, wired.com ↩︎

5. The disturbing YouTube videos that are tricking children, bbc.com ↩︎

6. How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind, Tristan Harris ↩︎

7. Why the infinite scroll is so addictive, Grant Collins ↩︎

8. Nguyen, L., Walters, J., Paul, S., Monreal Ijurco, S., Rainey, G. E., Parekh, N., Blair, G., & Darrah, M. (2025). Feeds, feelings, and focus: A systematic review and meta-analysis examining the cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use. Psychological Bulletin, 151(9), 1125–1146. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000498 ↩︎

9. Liberals, probably. I imagine rightoids are with me on this. ↩︎

10. why "things to do instead of doomscrolling" never works, Hazel Thayer ↩︎

11. In case you're even more autistic than me, this is a joke ↩︎

12. be your own algorithm, pagemelt. It's also worth mentioning that RSS still exists, and many indie web sites serve RSS feeds. ↩︎