The irony is that this site is clearly vibecoded, especially the https://status.microslop.com/ page, which "works" by requesting `https://outlook.office365.com/owa/healthcheck.htm` which is nonexistent and returns a 500 error but the code doesn't seem to detect that (and I don't think it could even if it wanted to, due to CORS).
Hard to know if this is itself slop or self-aware intentional slop to make a point.
The "GALLONS OF SLOP GENERATED" counter suggests some intentionality, and the "Everything seems to be working. Probably a glitch in our monitoring." caption on the status page maybe suggests that is also intentional.
IMO Windows phone design and Windows 8 Metro were too minimalistic and squared like this, but TBH the current version of Windows has nice design and you can customize the theme and other things.
The issue with Windows now is the unjustified delays and bugs. I think professional PCs suffer the most from bugs because my own PC works fine. Not sure it's completely Microsoft's fault, could be the company. Sometimes the problem can also be the hardware and it's also not completely MS at fault since many manufacturers can produce PC and at widely varying prices.
It has that AI referring to a point in the conversation feel about it too.
This site would be a particularly interesting example to see the conversation that generated it.
There was a case locally where a political party copped flack for using AI generated images of minorities implying that the people in the picture supported their policies. I didn't think the use of AI was terribly significant when it came to the output because, before AI, they would have just hired some actors for the photos and achieved much the same effect.
The thing that I did think was significant was, in creating the images, they must have committed to writing exactly what it is that they wanted an image of. I really wished that journalists asked for that text, and then challenged the inevitable refusal.
I believe that a lot of the problems with LLMs would be greatly ameliorated if every generated image had embedded in the metadata the prompt and by default, the user credentials (which could be turned off for folks who want privacy).
What am I even supposed to think "gallons of slop" means? Funny that this is both fake and meaningless. OP if you're reading this, this garbage was the worst possible way you could have made the point.
The "hide distracting items" option is the best thing Apple has done lately. Unfortunately there's not anything worth your time once you get that nav out of the way.
Flagged this. As much as I also love to dunk on Microsoft, this kind of crapware is not the way to do it. [I personally] don’t want this on the front page. [And I think others should join me in that belief. Let’s try to keep it a place for interesting things that took some effort.]
Then can you take yourselves back to Reddit or something? This used to be an interesting place to visit that was differentiated from other “hot take” havens on the net.
There's no manifesto ("manifest"??), the counter is completely fake, and the tracker doesn't show any of the user submitted reports.
There's nothing here other than: "Microsoft is integrating AI into their products and I don't like it, build a website about it please". It barely even has anything to do with Microsoft, it's more of a shallow "AI is bad" take.
Is this meant to be satire? It's rather in bad taste if you ask me, I have no idea how it got so many upvotes.
The Microslop Manifesto hitting the front page of Hacker News and Anthropic Claude servers showing "Partial Outage" at exactly the same time - a coincidence? "I think not."
Is Microsoft the really the main force drowning the internet in slop? I appreciate the discussion on the subject but why is it so specific on Microsoft and the userbase of Bing?
It’s funny because I wanted to register this domain for the lulz 3 months ago (Microslop is a fictional company in my videogame Microlandia) but the price was ~15k so i settled for the cheaper microslop.net
Whoever wants to get the message across has certainly big motivations ;)
I get the naming from the other thread, but is any of this particularly Microsoft-specific? Google creates a mess in search and their docs as well, slop code is one the main artifact of all these AI tools, and bloat, hallucinations and the sloppification of web content is a general problem.
People hate me, maybe its the Google employees on HN but Google search for me has been garbage for at least 10 years now. Even in the late 2000s they crippled it, every 5 years or so they make it worse and worse.
I think part of the problem is there's a lot of SEO farming type sites too, it feels like a lot of high quality content (even before AI slop was so common) is just gone. I hope Google takes this issue seriously and works on a true PageRank algo / service that fixes their search because its been bad for a while. Now I just ask Perplexity or any model for links to things instead.
IME this is the consensus view. Google's search quality is abysmal. DDG was the 1st popular alternative, but it's been supplanted by Kagi. Kagi costs a few $ /mo but that's part of its appeal, it's a great deal and a game-changer for the service (vs the user) to be the product.
It's due to both: the deranged AI push MS did in last 3 years and continuous degradation of their flagship product - Windows, for last 10.
I think no other company managed to get a punny nickname due to their questionable pursuits and actions around new trends. Tho most of them were ridiculed in memes and countless critical posts on the Internet when something have surfaced.
Also, it appears that Microslop was coined first in 1994, acc. to wikitionary [1]
Speaking of Google Search, I absolutely hate that the AI answers push down the whole content and you constantly misclick. Not to mention these are often hilariously wrong. Trying Brave Search currently and the AI answers are way more accurate and actually don't push the content down (it's a fixed container).
I understand that people are fed up of it running on their operating system (and perceived poor performance of Windows 11), but yes, google/duckduckgo are all running LLM queries with every search.
I have to use Windows 11 at work, it can literally take half a minute before a Win key, then, say, "ou" will find the program Outlook*.
* I was also completely unable to find a keyboard shortcut for New Outlook to filter by 'Unread' without performing a search and respecting the inbox search order etc.. Turns out the filter button just above the inbox is a React component and it can't be called from the Alt - key shortcut.
TBH, I discovered the website by just domain checking the word. It might be that someone has been inspired by the same incident to write down their general thoughts and if not for it, the website would've been slopgularity.com.
The AI backlash is interesting to watch. It’s both right and wrong.
It’s right that slop is real and a lot of present AI is crap, and it’s right about the risks to employment and the economy. But when it comes to the first, it’s wrong that this won’t get better. AI is advancing rapidly.
When it comes to economics, AI is just bringing to a head long standing fundamental problems with wealth distribution and fairness that have been building for a long time. AI might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but the camel isn’t looking so hot. Before AI hit big we already had two generations priced out of housing.
The story on journalism and public discourse is, I think, similar. AI might be the last nail in that coffin but the coffin was already closed and the man was already dead. Social media algorithms and man-made disinformation killed public discourse more than a decade ago. Any solution to those problems should also help the slop problem.
My point is that all these problems were nearing crisis level without AI and would still demand solutions without AI. AI might actually help by making them no longer possible to ignore.
Meanwhile all this criticism totally ignores what AI will make possible and is already making possible. Typical human negativity bias.
I think text/code genAI still have space to grow, but it's the same space fixed image generation models had two years ago. The usage grew, the costs diminished, the accuracy slightly increased, but the weirdness will stay, and gross mistakes are still there, at a similar rate.
> it’s wrong that this won’t get better. AI is advancing rapidly.
Even assuming this is true for the high-end productivity models (like Claude Code), how does this change anything about the main argument?
The AI integrations which are getting forced on me in every single app aren't using those newer models: I try them every few months just-in-case and they are always complete garbage. The people generating SEO blogspam sure aren't going to pay for the fancy models either. And it's not like the herders of the AI bots vomiting comments all over social media care about quality. Unless you are an active ChatGPT / Claude / whatever subscriber, most of your day-to-day interaction with AI will always be with the cheapest slop you can imagine - and that's what the backlash is primarily against.
Besides, I don't actually care whether you are stuffing dog poo or delicious tomatoes in my mailbox, I want it to stop! I never asked for it, and it's ruining all the stuff I actually want delivered to my home. Those integrations are at best as annoying as the "Chat with a sales consultant!" and "Let our site send you notifications!" popups: even if your AI were to achieve AGI, I would still want them gone.
The anxiety surrounding AI-generated "slop" mirrors the frantic warnings of late 15th-century clerics who viewed the printing press as an engine of spiritual decay. Johannes Trithemius, a prominent Benedictine abbot, famously argued that monk-scribes should not abandon their pens, fearing that printed books were ephemeral, error-ridden toys that would undermine the sanctity of scripture and the discipline of the mind. He believed that the sheer volume of cheap, mechanical texts would drown out genuine wisdom and lead to a permanent decline in the quality of human thought.
History shows he fundamentally misunderstood the human capacity for adaptation. Rather than succumbing to a sea of printed garbage, society developed sophisticated new filters. We invented the modern bibliography, the peer-review process, the concept of a "trusted publisher," and the critical literacy skills required to navigate a world where information was no longer a rare luxury. Humans have an innate drive to seek out signal over noise. Just as the chaos of the early printing era eventually gave way to the Enlightenment, our current struggle with synthetic content will likely trigger a new evolution in how we verify truth and value human insight.
Manuscript could contain handwritten errors and of course there could be misprints due to wrongly selected types but content wasn't generated out of nowhere. Unless we're talking about asemic or automatic writing due to some... "spiritual" influence.
The key here is human thought as you said. Whether these books were written by clerics or printed by the press these were still containing human produced substance. It's not a fair comparison.
Incredibly valid opinion. Many people disagree but this is an extremely possible future for AI.
There is also a darker future where AI improves to the point where it’s no longer slop. It produces quality code, texts, and books that are better and in a fraction of a second after one misspelled prompt. Given the past trajectory of AI, this is the more likely outcome.
The other outcome is AI flatlines. This is as good as it gets. In which case the future you predict may come to pass.
"Generating slop is totally fine because we'll eventually develop anti-slop filters" isn't exactly the most convincing argument, you know.
Besides, your link between the "chaos of the early printing press" and the start of the Enlightenment is very forced. The Greek philosophers did plenty of critical thinking after all, and they had no need for a printing press. I see absolutely zero reason why the current AI bubble will inevitably result in an Enlightenment-like period, nor why AI would be a hard requirement for one.
The frontiers of mathematics is already incorporating AI and people like Terrance Tao are documenting the progress of AI. At the very least the current best mathematician in the world only does this because he has predicted an opposite conclusion to you.
So when you say zero reason, I have to tell you that your absolutist stance is blindness. There are many reasons why it can happen, and many reasons why it can’t.
There are ways to advance rapidly without causing problems for large numbers of people. LLMs are being forced everywhere and the result is a mess. Being serious about a promising new technology usually means going slow and emphasizing what tools and practices work for particular contexts. Instead we are all being told to use the latest because we will be left behind. It doesn't make sense to be slinging slop everywhere and then complain about journalism and public discourse because that is an option that was rejected.
The irony is that this site is clearly vibecoded, especially the https://status.microslop.com/ page, which "works" by requesting `https://outlook.office365.com/owa/healthcheck.htm` which is nonexistent and returns a 500 error but the code doesn't seem to detect that (and I don't think it could even if it wanted to, due to CORS).
Hard to know if this is itself slop or self-aware intentional slop to make a point.
The "GALLONS OF SLOP GENERATED" counter suggests some intentionality, and the "Everything seems to be working. Probably a glitch in our monitoring." caption on the status page maybe suggests that is also intentional.
Isn't that the point? As if Microsoft is the one making it.
If that was the point then why not mimic Microsoft's actual design?
> Microsoft's actual design
They wouldnt know what one is if it hit them in the face
There's a consistent Microsoft design?
Isn't the design inspired by Microsoft's Windows 8 flat design?
IMO Windows phone design and Windows 8 Metro were too minimalistic and squared like this, but TBH the current version of Windows has nice design and you can customize the theme and other things.
The issue with Windows now is the unjustified delays and bugs. I think professional PCs suffer the most from bugs because my own PC works fine. Not sure it's completely Microsoft's fault, could be the company. Sometimes the problem can also be the hardware and it's also not completely MS at fault since many manufacturers can produce PC and at widely varying prices.
Would be surprised, looks nothing like it. Certainly not to my eyes anyways.
At least they're being honest about the counter in their source:
It has that AI referring to a point in the conversation feel about it too.
This site would be a particularly interesting example to see the conversation that generated it.
There was a case locally where a political party copped flack for using AI generated images of minorities implying that the people in the picture supported their policies. I didn't think the use of AI was terribly significant when it came to the output because, before AI, they would have just hired some actors for the photos and achieved much the same effect.
The thing that I did think was significant was, in creating the images, they must have committed to writing exactly what it is that they wanted an image of. I really wished that journalists asked for that text, and then challenged the inevitable refusal.
I believe that a lot of the problems with LLMs would be greatly ameliorated if every generated image had embedded in the metadata the prompt and by default, the user credentials (which could be turned off for folks who want privacy).
This comment was almost certainly written by an LLM.
I recognise Claude's voice in that when I see it.
What am I even supposed to think "gallons of slop" means? Funny that this is both fake and meaningless. OP if you're reading this, this garbage was the worst possible way you could have made the point.
This site is extremely uncomfortable to read on mobile (iOS).
The "hide distracting items" option is the best thing Apple has done lately. Unfortunately there's not anything worth your time once you get that nav out of the way.
it also contains no "manifesto" ...
-tracker, -alert or -status would be more proper titles.
+2 android
Flagged this. As much as I also love to dunk on Microsoft, this kind of crapware is not the way to do it. [I personally] don’t want this on the front page. [And I think others should join me in that belief. Let’s try to keep it a place for interesting things that took some effort.]
[edited based on feedback.]
Hmm... Who's "we"? Did HN users elect you as a representative?
Better?
we do
Then can you take yourselves back to Reddit or something? This used to be an interesting place to visit that was differentiated from other “hot take” havens on the net.
There was this old hispanic site called mocosoft (moco translates to booger) that was succesfully sued by Microsoft due to a very similar name.
Or at least the mocosoft owener received a ceise and desist by Microsoft and decided to drop the site.
I expect something similar with this site
The site itself it's quite the slopfest too!
There's no manifesto ("manifest"??), the counter is completely fake, and the tracker doesn't show any of the user submitted reports.
There's nothing here other than: "Microsoft is integrating AI into their products and I don't like it, build a website about it please". It barely even has anything to do with Microsoft, it's more of a shallow "AI is bad" take.
Is this meant to be satire? It's rather in bad taste if you ask me, I have no idea how it got so many upvotes.
The Microslop Manifesto hitting the front page of Hacker News and Anthropic Claude servers showing "Partial Outage" at exactly the same time - a coincidence? "I think not."
Long live the revolution
The revolution will be tokenized.
Finally a use for blockchain.
Is Microsoft the really the main force drowning the internet in slop? I appreciate the discussion on the subject but why is it so specific on Microsoft and the userbase of Bing?
It’s funny because I wanted to register this domain for the lulz 3 months ago (Microslop is a fictional company in my videogame Microlandia) but the price was ~15k so i settled for the cheaper microslop.net
Whoever wants to get the message across has certainly big motivations ;)
> Whoever wants to get the message across has certainly big motivations ;)
Could be they are renting the domain instead for a fraction of the cost.
I get the naming from the other thread, but is any of this particularly Microsoft-specific? Google creates a mess in search and their docs as well, slop code is one the main artifact of all these AI tools, and bloat, hallucinations and the sloppification of web content is a general problem.
People hate me, maybe its the Google employees on HN but Google search for me has been garbage for at least 10 years now. Even in the late 2000s they crippled it, every 5 years or so they make it worse and worse.
If search shows more ads in the results it means they show more ads.
If the organic results are worse then the paid results it means people click on more ads.
If people have to search twice to find what they are looking for it means they show more ads.
I have no idea how google made their products so sticky while dropping the quality.
I think part of the problem is there's a lot of SEO farming type sites too, it feels like a lot of high quality content (even before AI slop was so common) is just gone. I hope Google takes this issue seriously and works on a true PageRank algo / service that fixes their search because its been bad for a while. Now I just ask Perplexity or any model for links to things instead.
IME this is the consensus view. Google's search quality is abysmal. DDG was the 1st popular alternative, but it's been supplanted by Kagi. Kagi costs a few $ /mo but that's part of its appeal, it's a great deal and a game-changer for the service (vs the user) to be the product.
It's due to both: the deranged AI push MS did in last 3 years and continuous degradation of their flagship product - Windows, for last 10.
I think no other company managed to get a punny nickname due to their questionable pursuits and actions around new trends. Tho most of them were ridiculed in memes and countless critical posts on the Internet when something have surfaced.
Also, it appears that Microslop was coined first in 1994, acc. to wikitionary [1]
[1] - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Microslop
Speaking of Google Search, I absolutely hate that the AI answers push down the whole content and you constantly misclick. Not to mention these are often hilariously wrong. Trying Brave Search currently and the AI answers are way more accurate and actually don't push the content down (it's a fixed container).
I understand that people are fed up of it running on their operating system (and perceived poor performance of Windows 11), but yes, google/duckduckgo are all running LLM queries with every search.
I have to use Windows 11 at work, it can literally take half a minute before a Win key, then, say, "ou" will find the program Outlook*.
* I was also completely unable to find a keyboard shortcut for New Outlook to filter by 'Unread' without performing a search and respecting the inbox search order etc.. Turns out the filter button just above the inbox is a React component and it can't be called from the Alt - key shortcut.
TBH, I discovered the website by just domain checking the word. It might be that someone has been inspired by the same incident to write down their general thoughts and if not for it, the website would've been slopgularity.com.
"Clawdbot, make me a website about how evil AI is. And make it snappy!"
Irony is that this site itself is text-book, generated slop.
I do not care how good your point is, even satirical, noble-minded slop is a waste of our collective time and energy.
what's the point of this site?
Streisand effect
> Microsoft bans the word "Microslop" on its Discord, then locks the server. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216047
Microsoft wants to be a Slopopoly, the single source of slop.
The AI backlash is interesting to watch. It’s both right and wrong.
It’s right that slop is real and a lot of present AI is crap, and it’s right about the risks to employment and the economy. But when it comes to the first, it’s wrong that this won’t get better. AI is advancing rapidly.
When it comes to economics, AI is just bringing to a head long standing fundamental problems with wealth distribution and fairness that have been building for a long time. AI might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but the camel isn’t looking so hot. Before AI hit big we already had two generations priced out of housing.
The story on journalism and public discourse is, I think, similar. AI might be the last nail in that coffin but the coffin was already closed and the man was already dead. Social media algorithms and man-made disinformation killed public discourse more than a decade ago. Any solution to those problems should also help the slop problem.
My point is that all these problems were nearing crisis level without AI and would still demand solutions without AI. AI might actually help by making them no longer possible to ignore.
Meanwhile all this criticism totally ignores what AI will make possible and is already making possible. Typical human negativity bias.
I think text/code genAI still have space to grow, but it's the same space fixed image generation models had two years ago. The usage grew, the costs diminished, the accuracy slightly increased, but the weirdness will stay, and gross mistakes are still there, at a similar rate.
> Meanwhile all this criticism totally ignores what AI will make possible and is already making possible.
I'm not ignoring it, I simply haven't seen compelling evidence of the hype.
> it’s wrong that this won’t get better. AI is advancing rapidly.
Even assuming this is true for the high-end productivity models (like Claude Code), how does this change anything about the main argument?
The AI integrations which are getting forced on me in every single app aren't using those newer models: I try them every few months just-in-case and they are always complete garbage. The people generating SEO blogspam sure aren't going to pay for the fancy models either. And it's not like the herders of the AI bots vomiting comments all over social media care about quality. Unless you are an active ChatGPT / Claude / whatever subscriber, most of your day-to-day interaction with AI will always be with the cheapest slop you can imagine - and that's what the backlash is primarily against.
Besides, I don't actually care whether you are stuffing dog poo or delicious tomatoes in my mailbox, I want it to stop! I never asked for it, and it's ruining all the stuff I actually want delivered to my home. Those integrations are at best as annoying as the "Chat with a sales consultant!" and "Let our site send you notifications!" popups: even if your AI were to achieve AGI, I would still want them gone.
the backlash presented on this site is specifically against Microsoft's AI crap. way to over-generalize
Is it really complaining about quality of AI? The dangerous part is that slop will be harder to detect.
The anxiety surrounding AI-generated "slop" mirrors the frantic warnings of late 15th-century clerics who viewed the printing press as an engine of spiritual decay. Johannes Trithemius, a prominent Benedictine abbot, famously argued that monk-scribes should not abandon their pens, fearing that printed books were ephemeral, error-ridden toys that would undermine the sanctity of scripture and the discipline of the mind. He believed that the sheer volume of cheap, mechanical texts would drown out genuine wisdom and lead to a permanent decline in the quality of human thought.
History shows he fundamentally misunderstood the human capacity for adaptation. Rather than succumbing to a sea of printed garbage, society developed sophisticated new filters. We invented the modern bibliography, the peer-review process, the concept of a "trusted publisher," and the critical literacy skills required to navigate a world where information was no longer a rare luxury. Humans have an innate drive to seek out signal over noise. Just as the chaos of the early printing era eventually gave way to the Enlightenment, our current struggle with synthetic content will likely trigger a new evolution in how we verify truth and value human insight.
Manuscript could contain handwritten errors and of course there could be misprints due to wrongly selected types but content wasn't generated out of nowhere. Unless we're talking about asemic or automatic writing due to some... "spiritual" influence.
The key here is human thought as you said. Whether these books were written by clerics or printed by the press these were still containing human produced substance. It's not a fair comparison.
I think his legacy is about stegography and cryptography. I think he relied on handwritten volumes and couldn’t adapt his cryptographic techniques.
Incredibly valid opinion. Many people disagree but this is an extremely possible future for AI.
There is also a darker future where AI improves to the point where it’s no longer slop. It produces quality code, texts, and books that are better and in a fraction of a second after one misspelled prompt. Given the past trajectory of AI, this is the more likely outcome.
The other outcome is AI flatlines. This is as good as it gets. In which case the future you predict may come to pass.
"Generating slop is totally fine because we'll eventually develop anti-slop filters" isn't exactly the most convincing argument, you know.
Besides, your link between the "chaos of the early printing press" and the start of the Enlightenment is very forced. The Greek philosophers did plenty of critical thinking after all, and they had no need for a printing press. I see absolutely zero reason why the current AI bubble will inevitably result in an Enlightenment-like period, nor why AI would be a hard requirement for one.
The frontiers of mathematics is already incorporating AI and people like Terrance Tao are documenting the progress of AI. At the very least the current best mathematician in the world only does this because he has predicted an opposite conclusion to you.
So when you say zero reason, I have to tell you that your absolutist stance is blindness. There are many reasons why it can happen, and many reasons why it can’t.
There are ways to advance rapidly without causing problems for large numbers of people. LLMs are being forced everywhere and the result is a mess. Being serious about a promising new technology usually means going slow and emphasizing what tools and practices work for particular contexts. Instead we are all being told to use the latest because we will be left behind. It doesn't make sense to be slinging slop everywhere and then complain about journalism and public discourse because that is an option that was rejected.
Yeah,,, we want QUALITY slop! And we want it NOW!