Post by redonihunter in How a platform could curb low-effort submissions while protecting indie devs - e.g. stop the slop

Viewing post in How a platform could curb low-effort submissions while protecting indie devs - e.g. stop the slop

that is a huge assumption unless you have actual backend data to prove it

i have seen several such accounts. Especially ai slop creators are easy to spot if you could access the data on Itch's side. The system could tell staff, when an account is uploading several projects a week. There is an ai agent account that uploaded over 500 projects the last two months.

I saw a manuel slop uploader with over 200 projects and another one with over 100. And several accounts boasting their many ai projects in release announcements.

So, no, that is not an assumption. It is an observation. Those slop accounts exist and they upload 10x to 100x the amount of projects of regular users.

You want to deter slop uploaders with this wager of losing money. Whom you would also deter is hobby developers. And Itch will not want to do that. What you call noise is what most games on Itch are. There is maybe 10% or less games on Itch that would pass your proposed test. Oh, and the professional slop uploaders would pass your formal test.

But if Itch would make a stance and actively hunt down those slop spammers and tell people that they do that, that might catch the right people and deter them from wasting everyone's time. A simple popup when uploading many new projects might work wonders here.

It creates a catch-22 where you need popularity to be seen

Curious how there is still popular games. I wonder why they became popular then, if the only way to get traction is to be seen on release day for five minutes on recent.

I think your premise is wrong. Recent is not the place to get popular. And becoming popular by merely existing on Itch is very hard.

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Simpl_pseudocode20 days ago

Spotting a few high-volume accounts is anecdotal evidence, not platform-wide data. Banning those obvious accounts is simple, but it does nothing against (for example) spammers using automated bot networks and rotating throwaway profiles. Pretending that a simple warning pop-up will deter automated spam is remarkably naive.

Furthermore, claiming that "professional slop creators would pass the test" completely misunderstands their economic model. Slop farming relies entirely on zero upfront costs. No automated spammer is going to risk $100 per upload across dozens (or worst, hundreds) of generated projects when they know the vast majority will fail basic quality checks or download thresholds. Front-door friction destroys their entire business model overnight.

As for popular games, most of them achieve success by driving external traffic from social media, YouTube, or streamers. But a storefront telling its own creators that its internal release feed is an unnavigable dump and that they must rely entirely on external marketing is a failure of basic platform discoverability.

A platform's new release feed should be a launchpad for unknown talent, not a landfill you have to bypass.

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