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Comment by rdlw | Hacker News Reader

Spam is content that is delivered to people who did not request it. Slop is content which pretends to be what you want, but turns out to be of low quality.

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Huh. Whether or not a word has this meaning or that depends upon acceptance. You say it means X, someone else says it means Y, where X and Y can be arbitrarily dissimilar. And as much as you might be saying "means this to me", the way you are each phrasing it you mean "for all". How do either of you resolve this?

What is there to resolve? The comment I responded to was saying there's no useful distinction between the two words, I pointed out a distinction that I see between the two in what I think is accepted usage. Of course I see my opinion as more correct, since if I found something more convincing I would change my opinion. As the word becomes more widely used, usage will settle down.

Argh, my apologies. The comment above yours in the sequence I see defines spam as unwanted marketing content, yours as unwanted content in general. For reasons unknown I saw that one as the parent of yours.

I don't see the difference. An email that pretends that I need to buy some pills and turns out to be a card collecting scam is obviously of low quality and not something I have requested.

Computer generated fake texts are spam, doesn't matter if they're selling pills to me or my attention to ad networks.

I see 'slop' used more often in contexts where, say, you look up a problem you're working on, find an article that seems to be relevant and may have the answer you want, but at some point turns out to be devoid of content and possibly AI-generated.

That's spam. That's like the messages in your inbox of yesteryear that tried to entice you to look at them but they'll just waste your time or worse if you do.

Spam = unwanted and against what you asked for, trying to sell you something or get you to do something

Slop = technically what you asked for, but intentionally created just to fill space and increase traffic/hits, generally of the lowest quality rendering it unusable

Then, to me, it's spam. The only times I've asked for fake text generated by a computer I stitched together some markov chain library and a corpus myself, and then it was to make the point that some people are so badly affected by ads and political propaganda that their contributions to the texts of humanity could easily be replaced by my code.

The problem is that sometimes slop looks like content from a far enough distance. And to the untrained eye, it is indistinguishable from real content. For example, a Kafka tutorial could start with pages about other irrelevant technology before getting to the real material. But you wouldn't know which content is useless at first.

Could you define "content"?

Ok, think about it like this. It's your anniversary with your partner so you decide to commission a drawing from an artist as a gift. However, when you receive it, it's clearly an AI-generated image that was printed out.

Would you still consider that "spam"?

Yes. I also call the music-reminiscent sounds played in shops in malls spam.

Sounds like you'd prefer to interpret slop as being a subset of spam. So all slop is spam but not all spam is slop.

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