Slop (Slang)

About

Slop is the slang term used to describe content online that is considered low effort and only meant to barely entertain people who watch it. Colloquially, it's a term that is used to describe content that previously would have been described as "second monitor content" only meant to be background noise while the person does a different activity, such as eating while watching YouTube or doing chores around the house. Used for a while to describe different types of content, primarily AI-generated content due to the low effort required in making it, starting in 2023 it began to be used to describe YouTube videos which are seen as low effort, such as reaction videos.

Origin

While similar to sludge content, YouTube Kids content and Elsagate, "slop" as a slang term was first used to describe content just made for the sake of being made for fans. This description was given via a metaphor by YouTuber Pyrocynical during a podcast. On April 28th, 2023, a clip from an episode of the TBH podcast was uploaded by the YouTuber^[1] TBH Clips in which Pyro describes his second channel's content as slop to put in the trough for his viewers to consume like piggies (shown below).

Spread

After Pyrocynical used that as the description for his content, fans of his started to use "Slop" as the generic slang term for the low-effort, react-style content that would often be shown on it. On June 20th, 2023, the Redditor^[2] /u/ausyappy uploaded a Walter White cooking meme which was captioned to show Pyrocyncial uploading a video on his secondary channel talking about the large amount of slop content made on it, while naming the post "WE LOVE SLOP" (shown below).

Over the following year, the term quickly started to spread across and become used whenever there was low effort reaction videos such as always giving an opinion about recent drama, or "reaction bait," in the form of AI-generated pictures which are meant to make people reply or react to earn money off monetization. On July 3rd, 2024, the Redditor^[3] /u/Previous_Knowledge91 posted a Starterpacks in the /r/starterpacks subreddit which was titled "Facebook AI Slop Starterpack" and included several common examples of images that often go viral on Facebook while being AI-generated (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References