Back to writing with a whimper.
There was a specific era of writing online, notably on Twitter and LinkedIn, that sits somewhere between the early blogging era and the age of “AI slop”.
The intermezzo of human slop. Written by humans, for robots.
Cramming triggers to try and bump it up within the notice of THE GRAND ALGORITHMS and reap the rewards in likes, ad revenue and future eyeballs to restart the loop.
The most egregious of these, at least to mine eyes, looks something like this:
“89% of useless losers do this, be a top 1% and worthwhile human by following this overly simplistic advice”
Now - this does at least do the decent thing and dresses in wolf’s clothing, standing out clearly as the sort of slop I am both irked by and yet unable to let go.
The fake statistics - giving this the veneer of a researched phenomenon - soon give way to a keyword heavy plea to blindly follow the advice of the latest superstar or to follow the genius advice sifted and pulped from the last week’s X deluge and condensed into neat bullet points.
At last dear readers you have been given the absolute and undeniable keys to unlocking your secret potential and finally joining the top 1%.
Never mind that the advice is generic and/or shorn of all the context that made it in any way relevant or useful. If it doesn’t work come back next and we’ll give you the really real thing you’re doing wrong that the top 0.1% do differently.
And if you just absorbed it with your eyeballs and didn’t even try to apply it then how can you blame us for the advice being worthless?
Aside: I have noticed less of this writing on my feed recently and I don’t know if a) it’s no longer promoted and so isn’t incentivised b) people are numb to it (causing a) ) c) I’ve nudged it off my feed by engaging with different things
Whatever the cause I’m not sad to see it disappear. And if you do post a headline like this you can be sure I want to know where you got your numbers from.