If your feeds look stuck in 2016, you’re not alone. An Instagram “Add Yours” prompt asking for 2016 throwbacks has amassed more than 5.2 million posts, while Spotify says user-made “2016” playlists have jumped 790% since the new year. The sudden rush feels timely, but the sentiment behind it is deeper: people aren’t craving 2016 itself so much as the internet before the slop.
Slop is the mix of engagement bait, AI mush, SEO-churned pages, and endless reposts that now crowd results and timelines. The pre-slop web felt smaller, more legible, and more human—messy, yes, but navigable. That’s the web many are trying to summon when they post a grainy photo from “Pokémon Go” summer.
What People Miss Is Pre‑Algorithm Culture
By 2016, the social internet had just completed its first decade-long consolidation. Smartphones were ubiquitous—Pew Research Center pegged U.S. smartphone ownership at roughly three-quarters of adults—and feeds, more than bookmarks, determined what most people saw. Pew also reported that 62% of U.S. adults were getting news on social media, a tipping point for platform power.
Yet traces of the older web remained. Discovery still felt organic, forums and fandoms were vibrant, and Google search returned fewer obvious content farms. Meme culture was translating into mainstream politics—meme archivists such as Amanda Brennan have chronicled how this spread—but the machine hadn’t fully optimized every interaction for ad impressions and watch time.
The same year, the Anti‑Defamation League classified Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol, a stark signal that online subcultures had fused with offline discourse. Still, many users remember a web where communities—rather than platform knobs—set the tone. That felt like agency.
How Slop Took Over the Modern Internet and Our Feeds
Call it enshitification, to borrow author Cory Doctorow’s term: platforms improve for users, then for business customers, then for the platform itself, until the experience degrades. The signs are everywhere. SparkToro’s analyses have shown that a majority of searches end without a click, reflecting how answers and ads increasingly trap attention on-platform. Imperva has reported that roughly half of web traffic now comes from bots, flooding the pipes with automation that muddles signals of quality.
The pages themselves are heavier and harder to parse. The HTTP Archive has documented steady growth in scripts and page weight since the mid‑2010s, contributing to slower sites and noisier experiences. Meanwhile, feed-ranking systems reward volume and recirculation, so low‑effort content crowds out original work. Add modern generative AI, and the cost of making plausible filler content has fallen close to zero.
Users feel it. Discovery is less serendipitous. Search is more work. Even credible information often looks indistinguishable from manufactured sludge. Nostalgia is the natural backlash.
2016 Wasn’t Simple—The Web Just Felt More Human
It’s worth acknowledging that 2016 was hardly carefree. It was a year weighted by political shocks and violence. But online, many everyday tasks were still easier. Deepfakes were rare, image generators didn’t blur the line between real and synthetic, and teachers weren’t triaging AI‑written homework.
Google searches felt more trustworthy. Dating apps still promised novelty. Instagram had far fewer videos, and “chronological feed” wasn’t a culture‑war phrase. The memory people are chasing is the sensation that the internet served human curiosity rather than extracting it.
Rebuilding the Internet We Miss, One Choice at a Time
Rolling back slop won’t be solved by throwback playlists, but practical fixes exist. Chronological options and smaller communities work; platforms that foreground them tend to feel calmer. Open protocols such as ActivityPub are creating room for decentralized networks where moderation and discovery are local, not one-size-fits-all.
Search can improve with better filtering and source labeling. Independent curation—newsletters, human-edited directories, and community lists—has resurged because people trust editors more than engagement metrics. Regulators are nudging in the same direction: European rules now push for more transparency and user choice around ranking systems, which could make it easier to opt out of black-box feeds.
Most importantly, audiences can reward signals of care: by following writers, subscribing to publications, and spending time where provenance is clear. Platforms optimize what we confirm with our clicks and attention. If the goal is less slop, the signals must change.
The nostalgia wave isn’t really about a year. It’s a referendum on how the web feels today. People remember an internet that was slower, more human, and less gamed—and they’re voting with their posts to get it back.
