It used to be Mobile First. Then Content First, User First, Privacy First, API First. Each of these principles said not just where to begin. It also said what gets thrown overboard when the pressure is on.
Apparently, nobody built the system that ships slop.
You choose to ship faster. To push research until after launch. To use prototypes only for alignment — not for validation. Every decision is reasonable. Every decision makes sense in the moment it’s made.
And then you’re there.
Slop by slope. No explosion at the end. Just a system that failed the way most systems fail: without anyone being rewarded for noticing it was happening.
The slope doesn’t need a moment of choice. It needs accumulation. “We’ll iterate afterward.” “This is just for alignment.” “Speed is existential right now.” No single step is wrong enough to notice. Together they build a system — that nobody built.
Friction has no KPI. Contradiction carries cost. Delivery gets rewarded. Doubt slows things down. This isn’t a decision. It’s an equilibrium.
The obvious counter-arguments: “The choice is yours.” “Teams have to refuse to let speed stand in for understanding.” Both assume you see the slop coming. The slope was there before the decision.
No individual deserves blame for not caring enough about the truth. That’s only the easier case. As for the broader relationship with truth — the Zeitgeist has long since taken its own direction. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt described the crucial distinction in 1986: the liar knows the truth and distorts it. The bullshitter doesn’t care about truth at all. He doesn’t ask whether it’s accurate. He wants it to pass as best it can.
That was 1986. It took the Zeitgeist forty years to prove him right.
Bullshit scales. That goes for posts on X (Twitter), for spinners — and for product decisions.
Slop is the industrial consequence. Fast fakes that look like solutions. Smooth and convincing. The system doesn’t ask whether they work. It wants them to pass as best they can.
I’ve read many articles on this. The answers I keep finding are always the same: work harder on yourself, be more disciplined, resist the pace.
What they have in common: they are individual answers to a structural problem. Popular precisely because they make nobody with systemic responsibility uncomfortable.
Jakob Nielsen invented “fake it till you make it” as a method with humility built in: the sketch stays rough because the thinking isn’t done yet. Roughness kept the conversation at the right level — are we building the right thing at all? His current advocacy replaces the rough sketch with an AI-generated interface that looks finished. The decision loop closes too early. What follows is the most expensive meeting in product development: everyone debates the button color. Generating and testing at scale sounds like rigor. It is a transfer of responsibility — from the designer who must choose, to the data that can’t.
Nielsen built his reputation on the meta-level — close enough to production to theorize, far enough to stay clean. Maybe that’s why the output impressed him. Distance from consequence makes the output impressive.
Decisions don’t just fail to scale — they get blocked. They get called friction.
Whoever asks whether what we’re shipping might be slop doesn’t become a hero. They become friction. And friction has no KPI.
Günther Dueck would call it Schwarmdummheit — collective stupidity; nobody’s fault, everyone’s outcome. That’s not wrong. But it doesn’t explain who benefits from the outcome.
Structures this stable usually serve someone.
Who?
Wieland Kloimstein
I am a UX Designer and Design Strategist for products where wrong decisions have real costs.
I surface what high-fidelity demos tend to hide: unresolved system questions, political blockers, missing foundations for decisions that can’t be undone.
I provide the judgment and friction that generative systems cannot replicate.
Based in Vienna / Austria
Contact me: wieland@wieland-kloimstein.com