Starting from Zero When the Internet Is Full: The Slop Arms Race

Starting from Zero

As any good software dev does, I've started and consistently avoided finishing countless personal projects in my life. Every once in a long while, I get a wild hair to see something through to "completion", which during the build phase feels like this moment not too far in the future where I've finished the MVP and can finally share it with the world. If you've ever gotten to that point where you're ready to share something you've built with real people, you know the mix of excitement and terror that comes with it. In mid-2026 though, the real terror comes after you hit "publish" on your launch post and realize the internet has become a very loud and crowded place, which means getting noticed is seemingly impossible. If you don't get noticed, you don't get users.

The Slop Arms Race

If you've ever tried to reach new potential users on the internet, you've likely come across the idea of organic traffic generation. One method in this area is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization), boiled down to "Get your links on the first results page of a few Google Search queries". Theoretically, you create some content once and see where it places once it's indexed by Google, and if it doesn't place in the first page you make some alterations or try again with some new content. People click on those links, maybe a blog post in the general area of your business, and you get traffic without having to actively chase it down. Maybe 1% of those users who land there convert to paying customers, but you didn't have to pay for ads to gain them. There's also AIO (AI Optimization) which focuses on optimizing content that's cited by AI systems rather than just ranking in traditional search results.

There's all sorts of tricks people have figured out to place well in Google/AI agent responses. And because humans have written about those methods, AI agents have inevitably picked up that same knowledge. I call this the Slop Arms Race because it's quickly become a constant battle of trying to outmaneuver the next person who's endlessly prompting Claude to generate content that ranks well for the same prompts/queries you're targeting. Comptetion for placing in Google search result pages isn't new, but it used to require at least a little actual work to increase the apparent value of your content to out-comptete. Now, it's largely a matter of who can generate the most SEO and AIO slop the fastest, while trying and usually failing to obscure the fact that it's AI-generated.

Help me, Pangram. You're my only hope.

One clear pattern that's emerging in different platforms is providing signals of what media or content is AI-generated versus human-written. Substack just partnered with Pangram to implement such a system, to mixed reception. Generally though, it does seem like users internet-wide are craving ways to easily identify if the content they're consuming is written by an actual person.

On the other hand, Google has specifically stated that they don't drop the ranking of content solely because it is AI-generated, as long as it meets their quality guidelines and provides value to users. Even still, they do make it clear that content must demonstrate expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) to perform well in search results. The thing with AI-generated content is that literally anyone can generate it at any time as long as they have some tokens to spare, meaning that content won't do well in rankings unless you're basically first to market for a given query. And if you're first to market, that's probably because nobody is actually searching for what you're "writing".

Writing the old-fashioned way

Based on mostly anecdotal evidence backed up by the general direction I've been sensing from different platforms, it seems organic growth is increasingly dependent on human trust rather than anything else. You have to write things that people actually connect with, where they can sense that there's a real person and their meaty fingers behind the prose they're spending their time reading.

Unfortunately for those of us starting businesses from scratch with little to no money to burn on ads, this means going back to writing posts by hand, with actual thought and creativity required to stand out in a crowded space. It means work hasn't gone away. The silver lining is that if you do put in the effort in this time when slop-producers are still non-stop generating and posting, you may stand out a little bit more. You're the person actually writing. And there are millions of people out there that want to read things people actually write. So share personal experiences, accept a very human lack of polished grammar, and keep on keeping on.