If you’ve been online for more than five minutes, you’ve watched social media slowly rot in real time: more ads, more surveillance, more “please train an AI on my face/voice/art” vibes, and a whole lot of algo nonsense. As an artist and content creator, I’ve been praying for an alternative that doesn’t treat creators like free data. In this video, I talk with William Lavel (Haven Social’s founder) about Haven: a new platform that’s explicitly anti-AI, anti-enshittification, and built to protect users from data scraping, facial recognition surveillance, and forced AI features. We get into what makes Haven different—especially the part that made me go “that’s crazy”: paying humans for appeals and moderation instead of hiding behind automated systems. Haven also wants to offer free “poisoning” for artists (think Glaze/Nightshade/Mist style protections) by letting you upload your art and using their hardware to do the heavy lifting, which is huge if you don’t have a beefy GPU. We also talk incentives: discouraging AI slop by denying monetization to accounts that post it, plus a community reporting flow that actually rewards people and can route money back to creators. On top of that, Haven’s pitching transparency around the algorithm (and my personal favorite: not rewarding rage bait), tools to reduce the “switching platforms is painful” problem by helping import posts/following lists, and a clear stance on privacy and scraping prevention. They’re small-scale right now, so the big takeaway is: if this sounds like the social media we’ve all been begging for, they need Kickstarter support to scale.