“Forcing my oomfs to take the Turing Test”, said one X user.
Photo by Amit Roth and Claire Cover
Twitter, formally known as X, allowed users to monetize their accounts beginning on July 14, 2023. According to users at the time, the “strat” became to “min-max” engagement on one’s account, posting and replying “crazystyle,” that is, frequently. One such user is former X personality Walton Stork, who recently complained about this topic on his Bluesky account. “I loved the extra cash, don’t get me wrong. But commenting relevant takes is an art, and now that any Coder Cody can let an AI take the reins, there’s no love in the game.
“I left Twitter, formerly known as X, because I felt choked severestyle by the f-ing slop around me. Nothing’s original. Nobody wants you to be happy. You are ragebaited, sadbaited, and phishbaited out of your own wallet! There’s no more place in this country for good center-right-leaning male voices.”
The “slop epidemic” has worried X users, those who wish politics were “normal” again, and logologists. “Surreal, what is happening online right now,” writes Tim Verbatim, Professor of Logology at the University of Colorado, South Denver. “The posted word is now cheaper to produce than the spoken word. By the amount of thought put in, a given X reply is worth less than a spoken filler word. To help collect data for this study, I reached out to the Economics Department at UCSD to track the rise and fall of the value of words themselves. They always attach opportunity cost price tags to abstract activities anyways, so it wasn’t a big leap. What we found is that as supply of right-leaning takes and misinformation increased, demand for discourse plummeted. If you want to communicate soulfully in this day and age, send an image. At the time of publication, pictures aren’t worth a thousand words, but 2,139 precisely. Remember, a meme in the inbox is worth 713 ‘I love you’s’.”
Without value in words, what’s left of the human population on X has little way to effect change on the platform. Attempts to communicate via replying to the posts of X celebrity @elonmusk get buried at a higher rate than the average human typing speed. What little the X mogul did for the platform has since ceased last January, as he prepared for his “big boy government job.” After observing how such a polarized climate could benefit one person, users of social media platforms across the board worry that “the slop could break containment” and potentially further devalue human time and effort. This sentiment, however, has only been able to spread through the use of “hopelessnesscore” memes and images, as words alone were insufficient.
A counterstudy published by economists at Utica College in South Dakota argues that images aren’t as valuable in the picture-word economy as previously believed. “They forgot photo generation programs,” states the abstract of the study. “If a picture can be generated from any prompt, creativity and originality are no longer important to the communicator, like with words. No form of visual communication is valuable. In this study, we determine that with this taken into account, images are worth 1000.56 words again. This means either that the picture-word economy is incredibly healthy again, or that nothing ever changes.”
Amit is a cog in this machine. But doesn't everything run on optic cables or something?
