TechTakes

2750 readers

193 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

dgerard@awful.systems

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 week ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

192 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Hypnosifl@awful.systems 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I think this may have been a case of the "dirtbag left" types using slang that originated on 4chan, I did a search with date restrictions on the 4plebs archive site and found posts using it for mindless entertainment going back to 2012 at least

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Here's an example from an 1897 book review I found in the google books corpus: "There never was anything in all this world quite so provincial as American literature. When we over here are not reading slop we read the books that bear the approval of London." Or this doggerel from the October 1920 issue of Farm Journal: "I read all kinds of printed junk / the good, the noble and the punk / the ancient and the new / and men who see me reading slop / predict that if I do not stop / my head will go askew."

These both seem like wiktionary's current sense 8 ("Content or entertainment which is worthless, or produced and consumed mindlessly"), so I don't see any need to credit 4chan or 21st-century anti-Semites in general.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73708#comment-1642217

[–] Hypnosifl@awful.systems 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Searching google books for "reading slop", this usage seems to be very sporadic (only 11 hits for 20th century publications), I'd think it was more just a case of independently coming up with the same shorthand rather than causal influence, whereas slop seems to have been used this way frequently enough on 4chan that it seems much more likely there was an actual chain of influence to later use on twitter and elsewhere, especially since a lot of other 4chan slang has later broken out in that way.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 1 points 3 days ago

Or there was less occasion for a term for this particular kind of bad? Correlation, causation, etc.