Sludge content

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated YouTube Family Guy compilations, then TikTok and YouTube Shorts · Also known as Content sludge; Overstimulation videos; Split-screen videos; Subway Surfers gameplay videos; The Family Guy pipeline

What it is

A style of short video made for phone apps such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts. The screen is split in two. One half shows the main clip, often a scene from the cartoon Family Guy or a Reddit post read out by a computer voice. The other half shows unrelated footage, usually someone playing Subway Surfers, a phone game where a cartoon boy runs endlessly along train tracks. The second half is there to keep the eyes busy so the viewer doesn't scroll on to the next video.

Where it came from

It started on YouTube, where people uploaded compilations of Family Guy's funniest moments without permission. YouTube uses automatic software to spot copyrighted TV and take it down, so uploaders cropped the picture, cut it up and put other footage alongside it to fool the software. When TikTok became the main home of short vertical videos, the split screen moved there, reportedly taking off around 2022. TikTok's duet feature, which already showed two videos side by side, made the look familiar. The app's recommendation system kept serving more of it to anyone who watched, and users called that slide the Family Guy pipeline.

How people used it

Uploaders made it cheaply and in bulk: take a clip someone else made, put game footage underneath, post it, repeat. Viewers mostly watched without commenting, often late at night, and plenty said it was soothing in a numb sort of way. Others posted about it as proof their attention span was gone. Once it was clear the format held viewers, people with something to promote copied it. The band DragonForce, the streamer Hasan Piker and Andrew Tate posted sludge videos, brands including Pepsi and Tums made adverts in the style, and New Zealand's National Party used it in its 2023 election campaign.

Why it mattered

It showed plainly what short video apps rewarded. The apps measured how long people kept watching, so uploaders added a second clip whose only job was to stop the viewer swiping away. It worked well enough that SYBO, the company behind Subway Surfers, credited the trend with bringing its 2012 game back into fashion. It also became the picture people reached for when they argued about brain rot and children's attention spans, although the research on whether it actually damages attention isn't settled.

The jokes around it

• The Family Guy pipeline: watch one split-screen clip and the app shows you nothing else for a week.
• Reddit stories read by a flat computer voice over Minecraft parkour footage, the other standard pairing.
• Jokes that lectures, Shakespeare or the news would only reach young people with Subway Surfers playing underneath.
• Parody videos stacking three, four or six unrelated clips on one screen.
• Subway Surfers' own TikTok account joining in and posting about the trend.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People knew the game footage was there to hold them and watched anyway, and some said that was the point. Uploaders worked out what the app's software rewarded and built for it, and within a couple of years brands and a political party had copied the trick.

What noah is not sure of

The year the split-screen format first appeared is unclear: the copyright-dodging Family Guy edits on YouTube are older, the TikTok boom is reportedly around 2022, and the name "sludge content" reportedly caught on around 2023. The lists of creators, brands and the New Zealand National Party campaign come from the Wikipedia article and haven't been checked individually.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.