The internet of cat slop

I got a cat recently and I'm still figuring out how it works. So, I've been doing a lot of internet searches for things like:

• Why does cat meow
• Cat meows loud at night
• Cat vocalization meanings
• Cat makes a sound that sounds like hello
• Cat needs nightlight

Because my cat, she makes some weird sounds. Lots of people have cats. The parts of the internet that aren't porn are cat pictures, right? There's even a Nebula and Hugo-winning short story about it, "Cat Pictures Please".

But instead of finding some lovingly obsessive blog post or scientific paper about cat vocalizations and their meaning, I got basically the same generic article over and over that starts feeling like it's going to get to a point but it never does. It just waffles about what the sounds are and then lists them all, usually in the same order, and ends with a disclaimer that it depends on context and you should take your cat to the vet to be sure. They even have reasonable seeming URLs that might have been someone's cat blog at some point. I learn nothing, but whoever owns the websites sure gets to serve me some ads for cat food while they waste my goddamn time. And after reading a few of these articles it became clear this wasn't even the merely shitty "content" that so much of the internet is stuffed with.

And "content" is bad enough. I worked for an internet media company in 2000 that was all about "content" and I used to make fun of it with my friends back then. Like, "content" just sounds like filler, and that's what internet companies think written material is, just filler to stick between ads and calls to action to sign up for spam. The sad reality is, the internet has been going to shit in this way for a long time. Probably much longer than I've noticed. I just haven't used the internet to search for popular topics lately.

Now that I'm looking up cat stuff, I'm running straight into a steaming pile of not merely "content" which some benighted copywriter wrote for barely any money at all and exists mostly to waste your time but is somewhat limited by the fact that someone has to pay someone some money to write it, but "slop" which is "unwanted AI-generated content." Like cat food that's been left in the dish all day because your new cat was too busy sitting in the dustiest possible crevasse in your house instead of eating it^[1], slop has an unmistakable smell. Or, at least, it's unmistakable to me. I have the uncanny ability to recognize almost anyone by their writing style^[2], in ways I can't even describe, and slop has a feeling, a vibe, a freaking smell. (I'm not sure I can tell ChatGPT slop from Gemini slop, but I haven't tested myself.)

Eventually I founds some YouTube videos from an influencer vet that included recordings of the weird cat noises along with legit explanations about what they normally are. But I didn't know, still don't really know, if the person was authoritative or just good at gaming the algorithm.

Lots of the things I normally want to learn about on the internet are too arcane go get much info about. You basically either get nothing, or you get something that immediately dumps you into super expert mode. Try reading through the Wikipedia pages about any mathematical topic (assuming you're not a mathematician) and you'll soon see what I mean. But popular things aren't good either, not anymore, because the web is flooded with "content" and "slop" while forums have been subsumed by Reddit, where the popular topics have rules so intense and constricting, presumably because so many people come to ask the same question, that they're just as waffly and useless as the content farm sites.

The only thing left is to ask your friends or go to the library.

When I was in middle school and high school, I used to have a notebook where I would write down things I wanted to know more about. It would be things like "Egypt" and "the Celts" and "herbs" and "Leonard Cohen," but also just anything at all I thought I could look up. Then, every Friday, my mom drove me to the library and I would go to the card catalogue, which at first was in little long boxes sorted alphabetically, but soon was on a computer which was a lot more convenient to search. The computer wasn't connected to the internet, not because the library didn't want you to be on the internet, but because it didn't have internet. It just had a computerized card catalogue. Anyway, I'd look up the stuff from my notebook and then go into the stack and get all the books that seemed vaguely related. Then I'd also pick ups some fiction from the science fiction section. I think there was a max of 10 books at a time, but it may have been higher, and I usually hit that. It's not that I read all the nonfiction books I took out cover to cover. I was looking for specific information and I knew that it was unlikely any single book would have it or have all of it. Long before I got trained how to do it formally in college, I knew how to just read the parts of the books that seemed useful and ignore the rest.

Then at some point, for a while, somewhere I guess between 1997 and maybe 2010, though I'm not sure really when, the internet had enough stuff, but not enough "content" and Google was actually good, and I would think back to that notebook with my topics of interest and how cool it was that I could find out whatever I wanted anytime, now. (Except, still, of course, the more arcane or old stuff, or hands on physical stuff, or skills which you still are better off learning from another person over time. OK so maybe not anything but truly a lot of things. Things you could learn about rather than learn how, in particular.)

I thought that was how it was going to be forever. That we would have the world of knowledge on the internet before us that anyone could access without having to get some additional meta-knowledge about what forum to ask, or what specialist database to search.

But that's gone now, isn't it. The SEO slickers and content farmers had mostly ruined it and now slop is the final thick layer of sludge, jamming up the open internet. If you want to learn about why your cat meows at night^[3], better write it down in your notebook and look it up when you go to the library.