Last week I watched a video called "The internet used to be a place", about how the internet lived in a room in our houses. It talked about the wacky graphic-design-is-my-passion-esque visuals and the sheer inaneness of it all, and how that's replaced by algorithmic slop now. It hit home. The internet used to live in my brother's room, then the hall, then my room, then it just was. Everywhere.
My grandmother says that if Youtube existed when she was young, she would have grown her sewing business to an empire. She's taken up sewing again after years. But I think that wouldn't have been possible without the algorithmic slop. The Algorithm (TM) bombarded her with the embroidery videos. The Algorithm, the great equalizer. The internet used to be a place, but the place was only for the rich and educated.
Quite a nihilistic take, but maybe the slop is inevitable in the presence of a platform. I have a whole obstacle course of digital wellbeing hacks to jump through to create friction in the way I consume content. Timers, timers for the timers, browser extensions with overrides for the overrides, and I still spend an hour on Instagram everyday because the algorithm is that good at giving me something that I just barely like. That works for me in a strange way. Maybe the content we consume is much like our diets. Probably should be well-rounded but a little junk won't hurt.