'Slop' Appeared in 1 of Every 149 Hacker News Comments in 2026, Up From 1 in 21,700 in 2023

Summary

Picture a shop owner who asks an AI tool for twenty blog posts, publishes them all, and waits for traffic. Among the people who build the web, there is now a one-word verdict for that kind of content: slop.

We counted the word slop in every Hacker News comment since 2019. Before the generative AI wave it was a rare word, used a few times a month. In 2026 it appeared in 19,564 comments, about 1 in every 149.

Most of that use is about AI output: writing, code, images and video produced in bulk with little care. The term moved from images and articles in 2024 toward code in 2026, as AI coding tools spread.

What we measured

We used the public Hacker News table on Google BigQuery and counted live comments containing slop as a whole word (sloppy does not count). Rates divide by all live comments in each year. Monthly counts start in January 2023.

For 2024 to 2026 we also flagged what each slop comment was about, based on keywords: writing and content, code, images, video, search results and SEO, books and music. We also counted mentions of widely known platforms in the same comments. A comment can fall into several groups or none.

From a rare word to 1 in 149 comments

Slop had an older life on the site, in phrases like slop in a mechanical part. That background use ran at about 1.5 to 5 per 100,000 comments a year.

The jump started in 2024 at 48.0 per 100,000, then rose to 249.4 in 2025 and 671.9 in 2026. The share of slop comments that also mention AI terms rose with it, from close to zero in 2023 to about half of all uses each month since mid-2024.

Month by month, the curve has not flattened

Monthly counts show steady growth with no sign of fading. The word took hold in May and June 2024, around the time AI-generated answers appeared at the top of a major search engine's results.

The literal phrase AI slop or LLM slop first appeared in January 2024 (4 comments) and reached 846 in August 2026. Many comments now just say slop without adding AI, likely because readers already know what it means.

Code joined writing as a top target

We looked at what slop comments talked about in 2024, 2025 and 2026.

Writing stayed the most common target, but its share fell from 30.5% to 23.0% as code rose from 8.1% to 22.9%. Images and video shrank as a share. Among widely known platforms mentioned in the same 2026 comments, Hacker News itself came first (916), then GitHub (730), Google (502) and YouTube (421).

What this means

Slop is now a common word for low-effort AI content among the people who build and judge the web, and they use it many times a day. Content that looks mass-produced gets that label fast, whether it is a blog post, a product page or a press release. The safest path is less content with more substance: real examples, real numbers and a human voice. A good AI search optimization agency will usually cut or merge thin pages before writing new ones.

AI assistants are built to pick useful sources over filler too. Find out whether your content is being cited or skipped with a free AI visibility audit, and be wary of any AEO agency whose plan is simply to publish more.

Limits

Slop is counted as a word, so some uses are unrelated to AI, especially before 2023. From mid-2024 about half of uses also name AI terms nearby, and many others clearly mean AI content without saying so.

Topic and platform groups are keyword-based and overlap; they show what comments mention, not a full classification.

Platform co-mentions do not mean the comment criticized that platform.

Dead and deleted comments carry no text in the dataset.

2026 covers January to September only.

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