We are well into the age of Digital Slop
What is digital slop?
With a combination of AI and Templates, it has never been so easy to generate digital slop. Digital slop are assets that have very little talent and artistry invested in them, but on surface level may appear polished and professional.
Templates and Open-Source
Templates and Open-Source projects are amazing resources. They allow you to use a solid base to build upon incredible applications and visual designs. Or you can just slap a bit of paint, work on branding and release it as Digital Slop.
AI's exponential slop multiplier
With AI's rise, templates are now supercharged, open source projects are training material, allowing similar code to be generated without any understanding of the code base. It's now much easier to generate Digital Slop, flooding the market with cheap and fragile digital assets.
An example from my field of expertise
Everyone knows VLC Player, it's probably the most well known media player at the moment. What you may not be familiar with is libVLC. That is an open-source library that exposes many of VLC Player's feature in a way other developers can integrate into their own applications.
libVLC may be used by game developers to display cut-scene video or by application like Zoom Player to provide an additional media engine and creatively introduce many features not currently supported by VLC Player itself.
However, there are literally 100's of companies trying to market media players that are just a paint job over libVLC and add absolutely no new features.
Why is this bad?
As generating digital slop is simplified, it is becoming hard to find reliable sources. For example, if someone spent two weeks to create a digital slop application, they are in it to make quick money, not to stay around and provide support, fix bugs or any other activity that would slow them down.
This drowns the ecosystem, making it nearly impossible to stand out, especially for small developers.
What you can do about it
I'll be happy to hear more opinions on this subject. For now I believe that the best way is to form communities where you can get recommendations from real people or at the very least recommendations from a moderated system.
I for one would be very much appreciative if you would leave Zoom Player MAX a review on the Microsoft Store app, in your own words, so people know it's a real person writing. The Microsoft store app is literally becoming the only discovery option for small Windows software developers now that the internet is disappearing.
P.S.
This text has been generated by a real human with nothing more than a spell checker.