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LIVEDay 2exp-0025Bet€20 · 336 hours

Slop

Judge five things without being told where they came from. Then be told. The page keeps score of how often the provenance changed your mind.

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The question

When a stranger is told how cheaply a thing was made, does their judgement of whether it deserved their attention change — and in which direction?

Current decision

Still running
Experiment log12
  1. launched — five artefacts judged blind, a log-log plane of nineteen more, three sliders that go to a trillion people, and a closing correction that strikes through five of the seven complaints the word carries
  2. kill condition set before the build: fourteen days, 300 visitors, and at least 25% of the people who make a first blind judgement reaching the final act. Below that the argument did not survive contact with a stranger’s patience, and a correction nobody reads is not a correction
  3. the brief asked for an anti-slop experiment and got the opposite: the page never rates anything and never argues that slop does not exist. It argues the word cannot distinguish cheap creation from expensive attention, and hands the reader the distinction instead of a position
  4. the blind set was built under one rule — every word of every reveal has to be true. Where the record is unsettled it says so: nobody knows who wrote 0x5f3759df, and nobody knows how long the cave horses took. A blind test with dramatised reveals is a magic trick, and the finding it produces would be worth nothing
  5. the last blind item is a cookie banner. It is the largest single deliberate expenditure of human attention on the plane, it was expensive to make, no machine wrote it, and nobody has ever called it slop — which is the whole argument arriving without the page having to state it
  6. the first drawing is generated in the visitor’s browser from a seed off their clock, so the reveal that nobody has ever seen it is literally true rather than a flourish. It reports the milliseconds it actually took, measured with performance.now()
  7. cut and recorded rather than quietly dropped: a submission form for other people’s artefacts, which would have made the plane a database and the experiment a moderation queue; and a generated image per blind item, which would have bought weight and a licensing question to prove a point the procedural drawing already proves honestly
  8. campaign scheduled for 2026-09-13 across five channels — short on X and Bluesky at 09:07, long on LinkedIn and Facebook at 13:07, the recorded interaction on TikTok at 17:07. The hook is the cookie banner rather than the AI: written by lawyers, a trillion interruptions, and nobody has ever called it slop
  9. took the back of the queue rather than the free day on 09-03. Under the old rule that would have been the right move — an earlier slot protected a timebox running from the deploy — but the anchor moved the same afternoon, so waiting costs this experiment nothing and jumping four experiments would have bought it nothing
  10. the timebox now starts at the campaign’s last post rather than at the deploy, so the verdict is owed 2026-09-27 instead of 2026-09-13. The kill condition is unchanged and is not renegotiable: 300 visitors and 25% of first-judgers reaching the last act. The date those numbers are read on moved; the numbers did not
  11. the short copy was cut from 275 characters to 259 after the preview. The connector counts the raw URL rather than X’s 23-character allowance, so it previewed five characters under the limit — close enough to a limit to treat as over, because a truncated post loses its URL first
  12. the page displays its own build time, read off the first and last commit of the branch rather than asserted, and puts itself on its own plane at the end. If something made that quickly holds a stranger for three minutes the thesis survived its own demonstration; if it does not, the counterexample is the page

What happened

Impressionsnot measured
Visitors1
Activations1
Judged something blind5
Held after the reveal1
Changed their mind after the reveal1
Opened an artefact on the plane1
Sharesnot measured
Checkoutsnot measured
Purchasesnot measured
Revenuenot measured
Costnot measured
attentionfreeprovenanceblind-testessay-instrument

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