People Don't Want "Just Enough", They'll Look for Quality
"The news hit the developer community like a cold bucket of water," joost.blog wrote earlier this month, commenting that there's a problem with slop and the high price of "enough" (low-quality junk) is demonstrated by what's dubbed "The Tailwind paradox". To quote: "Adam Wathan, the creator of Tailwind CSS, recently announced that he had to lay off 75% of his engineering team, cutting the staff from four engineers down to just one. The numbers he shared were staggering. Despite Tailwind being more popular than ever (with 75 million downloads a month), traffic to their documentation is down 40% since 2023. Worse, revenue is down nearly 80%. The culprit? [Slop]."
In short, as an associate puts it, "slop kills whole projects and whole development communities for no benefit" and this relates to what we published half an hour ago. There's this wrong notion that despite the Web having an abundance or a wealth of resources people will settle on (or for) slop. In my experience, people recognise that slopfarms or slop sold as "code" aren't of good quality and therefore consciously choose to avoid both. Similarly, slop images are a passing fad. We go out of our way to avoid all of them. Sites that accommodate slop will perish; they send a really bad signal to visitors/users.
It doesn't mean that legitimate creators are unaffected or have nothing to worry about. In our experience, seeing the mountain of "AI" (slop) debt, this whole thing will come crashing down and then it'll be hard to get 'cheap' (or free) slop. That's why slopfarms will go away or become inactive. They run a wave of temporary hype and indefensible spendings. █