Anti-slop: what if social media actually delivered on its promises?

On 25 September 2025, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Vibes, a rolling feed of short-form, AI-generated videos – the kind of content that’s widely-known across the internet as ‘AI slop’. It’s unclear who actually wanted this. In a world where excessive screentime has been linked to higher rates of anxiety and depression, and research says we spend 88 days a year glued to our phones, who’s asking to be more addicted to social media? Don’t we want to cut down on our social media use after the failed experiment of the 2010s? To log off and touch grass? Or do we really desire, deep down, an endless stream of mindless content to consume like farm animals? (See: ‘feed’ and ‘slop’ – the language of social media is lifted straight from the barnyard.) With Vibes, Zuckerberg appears to be betting on the latter, building a future that’s based on humanity’s worst impulses.

It’s worth asking how we got here – how, from Facebook’s 2009 promise to “make the world more open and connected”, we’ve landed in a digital landscape defined by attention traps, echo chambers, AI companions, and other dark patterns that push us further apart. But perhaps an even more pressing question is: where can we find a better alternative? Is there a future for social media that doesn’t require us to throw our phones directly into the ocean?

In the last few months, there have been signs of a growing backlash to AI slop and algorithm-driven social media, especially among younger users (sorry, your middle-aged uncle and his recycled XL Bully memes might be a lost cause). Initiatives like The Offline Club – with chapters in Amsterdam, London, Paris, Barcelona, Milan, Dubai and Aarhus – encourage people to hang out in person and cultivate new offline spaces to connect. ‘Offline’ dating apps like Breeze, Left Field, and happn attempt something similar for romance, in contrast with Meta’s new AI matchmaking service. And in 2024, Perfectly Imperfect (PI) launched its own social platform, which deliberately harks back to an internet before “AI, soulless algo curation, psychopathic CEOs, and slop content”.

The Perfectly Imperfect newsletter began – amid 2020’s coronavirus lockdowns – as a way for friends to share recommendations and discover new things, explains co-founder Tyler Bainbridge. “It was born out of watching friends’ behaviour, and my own behaviour... navigating toward whatever was being served to us on the internet, and starting to feel this bubble effect, of only seeing what algorithms want you to see.” To push back against this, the core idea was simple: “Get away from slop and return to human curation.” In practice, this started off with interviewing friends from Boston’s music scene, college, and elsewhere, and it “slowly spiralled” into something bigger. Today, interviews in the PI archive include Hayley Williams, Charli xcx, Mac DeMarco, Lena Dunham, Gia Coppola, Oklou, Ottessa Moshfegh, The Rizzler, and recent Dazed cover star Lorde. Each contributor is still prompted with the same, open-ended question: “What are you into right now?”

It was important that this focus on human curation remained at the centre of Perfectly Imperfect as it scaled up into a full social platform, Bainbridge suggests. “Everyone is still consumed by their algorithms, but each year we’re getting more and more fatigued. I wanted to build the social network so people could find friends, and just random people on the internet, who have similar taste to them, and to find recommendations from a wider range of people.” In part, this was seen as a way to “democratise tastemaking” – to resist the idea that only legacy publications and coastal elites get to define what’s cool. 

On the other hand, Perfectly Imperfect doesn’t subscribe to the idea that human taste can be condensed into a series of data points and articulated back to us via opaque algorithms. As we’ve seen play out on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X in years gone by, this framework tends to prioritise ragebait and homogenous slop over novel ideas and true creativity, even when it seems to contradict the wishes of the users. Individual humans bring something very different into the equation, Bainbridge suggests: “Everyone’s taste is a little bit chaotic and comes from a lot of different, unique experiences. That kind of spontaneity is important for discovery.”

For now, at least, Perfectly Imperfect doesn’t run on a recommendation algorithm: the content feed is chronological, with options to view new, ‘hot’, or top posts of the day. These feel closer to older platforms like Reddit (or Instagram pre-2016, or Facebook pre-2009). There’s also Today’s Ask, which prompts conversations on everything from records to dream blunt rotations. Crucially, says Bainbridge: “It’s easy for a user of the site to understand. It’s not, like, a black box algorithm where it’s hard to wrap your head around, ‘Why am I even seeing this post?’” This nostalgic vibe is reinforced by the website’s blocky, retro aesthetic. As Bainbridge puts it: “What’s old is new again.”

Besides taking inspiration from Facebook’s flaws (see: the aforementioned black box algorithms) the Perfectly Imperfect team also looked back to the social network’s past to replicate what it did right. This partly resulted in its Events tab, where users frequently list club nights, readings, birthday parties, DJ sets, and marathon watch parties. “My goal was to capture what made something like Facebook Events appealing, in my youth,” adds Bainbridge. “Where you could see a friend’s birthday party or housewarming in the same place as DIY shows on your college campus, or an underground rave. A lot of that was on Facebook.” Now, you might see a flyer on Instagram, but it rarely translates to actually attending the event, or knowing who else is going... and that’s if you even remember where you saw it after you scroll on and it disappears into the ether.

Building on its history of throwing intimate parties, the social platform also helped coordinate a series of 50 worldwide meetups on September 14. This included events in LA, Seattle, Mexico City, Berlin, Bangalore, Auckland, Montreal, and London (“the better meetup that happened in London this weekend,” said one user in a recap, since it coincided with the far-right rallies across the English capital). “It’s been cool to watch it grow,” Bainbridge adds of the Events section, which launched in August – even if it is kind of counterintuitive for a social media platform to encourage users to get offline and meet up IRL. “That’s not something that’s very concerning to me,” he says. “If people are making new friendships and discovering new things, they’ll come back. It doesn’t need to be five hours of your day. I think 30 seconds on PI might enrich your life a lot more than some other platform.”

It’s such a rare experience online now, to not be bombarded by adverts... It’s a lost era of the internet

This brings us to an awkward, but important question. Platforms like TikTok, X, and Instagram profit from the time and attention that users put into their apps – so, if Perfectly Imperfect’s founders think it’s OK to spend just 30 seconds a day on their platform, where’s the money coming from? “That’s a totally valid question,” Bainbridge says. The answer is split into two parts. One: a paid tier, which grants Perfectly Imperfect users the ability to customise their profile, as well as accessing extra newsletter content and archival interviews (a stark contrast to X, which offers all kinds of skewed incentives for paid users). And two: brand partnerships. However, these are limited to the newsletter, which adds to the old-school feel of scrolling through the social site. “It’s such a rare experience online now, to not be bombarded by adverts,” Bainbridge says. That, or to be afraid that your data is being sold off to said advertisers. “It’s a lost era of the internet.” 

If this is sounding pretty idealistic, maybe that’s because it is. Standing up for human connection and taste-making in the face of a algorithmically-driven, billion-dollar social media industry requires some strong ideas and a healthy dose of blind faith, especially when all the economic and political incentives point in the opposite direction. But this can also serve as a warning. Time and again in the last couple of decades, social platforms have been founded on (supposedly) strong, human-centric principles, only to cast them aside one by one in a process widely-known as “enshittification”. 

Bainbridge is determined not to fall into the same trap. “I think what sets us apart is that we’re not just a blank-slate social network,” he says. “We’re a place to share recommendations, and I think that little bit of added structure prevents a lot of the pitfalls... the trolls, or hate speech, and all kinds of things that end up destroying a platform.” And that sounds good! But the real test will come five, or even ten years down the line. Then, we’ll get to see if Perfectly Imperfect, and other platforms like it, managed to make their mission statement stick.