This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/prodleni on 2025-11-30 17:18:22+00:00.
This isn’t a “check out my project post”. Rather, I’d like to address a pattern I’ve been seeing everywhere, on this subreddit and others in the FOSS & programming space. That is: repos that have no clear purpose, and are 90% AI slop. Posts about these projects pollute our spaces, drowning out both 1) real, interesting projects, and 2) genuine beginners asking for feedback.
The thing is, oftentimes these posts aren’t meant to be malicious, intentional spam. It’s usually students and beginners that don’t know any better and are just emulating the harmful patterns they’re seeing all over the internet. But typing the same feedback over and over and over and over got really exhausting. There came a point where I just gave up and started ignoring the posts; and that’s when the spam wins.
After some great discussions on the topic with other developers and FOSS contributors, I realized it would be more useful to have a single resource that explains why this kind of project isn’t well-received in open source communities. So, I put together a simple static webpage, stopslopware.net. It’s basically a concise explanation of:
- what “slopware” is
- why it wastes everyone’s time
- why beginners should embrace messy learning instead of leaning on AI
- what authors can do to improve their projects meaningfully
If you think it’s useful, consider dropping a link to stopslopware.net the next time you see a slopware post that you’re too tired to critique. And if you think it’s off-base or needs some rewording, I’d appreciate some feedback.