[echelon]

With most comments being a paragraph or less, I think social media is done for unless it finds a way to put up a wall.

One thought is the subscription model of older social media sites, such as Something Awful. Pay $5 to get an account. Break the rules, get banned, pay another $5.

That's a lot of friction for your most valuable consumers, though. Marketers want users that are less discriminating.

Another is a shift to video and multimedia-based social networking. TikTok, Instagram, Twitch. It doesn't save the comments, though. I'm not sure how long we've got before the videos themselves can be generated with a high degree of novelty.

AI is going to change the game significantly. We're perfectly timed for a technological change of winds that enables new upstarts to challenge the incumbents. I'm kind of excited.