When you sign on, you are not greeted by photos of people posing nor videos of them speaking to the camera as they tap product packaging with their fingernails. Just a simple question, so basic as to appear strange: “What do you want to share?” For those of us who for years have been trapped on social networks dominated by constant ads, mysterious algorithms and the unending war for attention, Perfectly Imperfect’s query is oddly comforting. The platform was founded in 2024, and evolved through a newsletter by the same name that started in 2020 and whose philosophy was the revaluation of recommendations made by people over the tyranny of algorithms.
In contrast to other platforms’ constant exposure and infinite scroll, Perfectly Imperfect has a radically simple proposal: sharing recommendations. About whatever you like, from books to movies, albums, recipes, restaurants, everyday objects, ideas. There are no visible “like” buttons or hierarchies. Your recommendation is worth the same as everyone else’s. Nor is there pressure to construct an online identity or gain followers. In recent months, the platform’s profile has been elevated in terms of media attention and number of users, which have risen to over 100,000. Those who have landed on the site often experience a certain sense of relief. As if suddenly, the internet has begun to resemble what it once was.
It’s impossible to separate Perfectly Imperfect’s success from the context in which it has arisen. In recent years, criticism of massive platforms like Instagram and TikTok has been widespread. Science has confirmed the negative effects of spending too much time on them. Various studies suggest that extended screen time can wreck havoc on our brains (and particularly those of young people).
Tyler Bainbridge, Perfectly Imperfect’s co-founder, explained in a recent Dazed article that the idea to start the site came from observing his own online behavior during the Covid lockdown. “[I was] starting to feel this bubble effect, of only seeing what algorithms want you to see,” he recalled. His response was to return to human curation, getting away from the noise and returning to recommendations by actual people. The endeavor led to a newsletter in which he interviewed friends and acquaintances from different cultural scenes, always asking them the same thing: “What are you into right now?” With time, these conversations began to involve celebrities, among them musicians like Charli XCX, Mac DeMarco, writers like Lena Dunham and filmmakers the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, who recommended watching The Thief of Baghdad (1924).
The way the platform works is familiar, blending recommendations from celebrities with everyday users, creating an ecosystem of suggestions that don’t hinge on follower count or Hollywood establishment approval. This radical horizontality is also present in its design. In a departure from the current mania for minimalism, Perfectly Imperfect bets on a maximalist aesthetic with explicit references to 1990s internet: enormous fonts, flat and garish colorways and a deliberately flawed look, as per its name. “In 2020 I was frustrated by minimalist design across the web,” Bainbridge shared in an interview with It’s Nice That. “Which, when coupled with my mediocre design skills, led to a sort of cheeky middle finger approach of Internet Blue, big stars, a messy collage and the dreaded comic sans font.”
A social network with no algorithm
Perfectly Imperfect offers the option of ordering publications on your feed by the time they were posted or by popularity, but you always know why you’re seeing what you’re seeing. Posting itself is easy. There are no formats to learn or implicit codes to decipher. A user writes a recommendation and publishes it as-is, with no filters or visual requirements. There are no ephemeral stories, no dancing, no videos designed to capture your attention: the important thing is content, not its wrappings. Such simplicity can be soothing, and brings the joy of sharing back to something that more closely resembles passing notes between friends. An act that, as Bainbridge said in yet another interview with Notion, eliminates a big part of the “posting paralysis” that can take hold on other platforms.
Another fundamental element that distinguishes Perfectly Imperfect from other social networks is its tone. We are used to a digital environment in which conflict and provocation are compensated. But here, the platform is geared around the positive. It’s not about saying what you hate, but rather, what has you excited. “I think the way that algorithms have worked over the years is that they reward inflammatory content, or hot takes, which is one of the more toxic cycles on social media,” said Bainbridge in the Notion piece. “To me, it’s far more interesting to hear what someone loves. It’s being rewarded less and less to be like, ‘I love this album and here’s why.’ It’s not the kind of content that people react to. They react to ‘this album sucks,’ which drives discourse,” he added.
Such a setting has made it so that of nearly a half-million publications, Perfectly Imperfect’s content moderation team has only had to take down “a handful” (in the words of its co-creator) of messages that were clearly problematic. The community is self-regulating.
From the online universe to the physical world
Some people still remember the salad days of Facebook events. During the platform’s golden age, the easiest way to find out what was going on in your city was to peruse them. The feature allowed anyone, be it a concert promoter or a civilian user, to create an event and share it publicly. Perfectly Imperfect is attempting to vindicate that feature, and to help its users to leave behind the screen for a moment. Since its beginning, the project has organized meet-ups, parties, and concerts. Users share local plans from poetry readings to DJ sessions and birthday gatherings.
In Dazed, Bainbridge recognized that inspiring people to meet up in person might seem contradictory to the goals of a social network. But he said that the opposite is the case: “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,” he explained.
At the moment, 500 new users are joining on a daily basis, which means the biggest question mark of Perfectly Imperfect could be whether it can continue this expansion while maintaining its principles in the long run. The recent history of the internet is full of platforms that were founded with clear ideals they wound up leaving behind in the process of monetization. Bainbridge is well aware of this, and says that PI’s focus on recommendations will act as a natural deterrent for many of the problems that confront other platforms: trolls, hate speech and extreme polarization. Already, Perfectly Imperfect’s very existence in an absolutely saturated digital ecosystem is a sign that another internet is possible.
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