[tylervigen]

I think you are worried about the wrong problem. Forget about the influencers for a moment - what will your source of revenue be if you don't have an ad network?

Users are the content on social networks. If you charge them to join, you will have fewer users and less content on the network. That reduces the value so you can't charge as much, and the cycle continues.

[ToucanLoucan]

This is a remarkably consistent failure of imagination in an otherwise incredibly imaginative space. In the time I've been alive we've gone from bulky PC and monitor combos that took up entire desks to light-as-a-feather laptops that pack thousands of times more power and storage space, we've gone from me working for a day to figure out a CD burner to get all of my data on my computer backed up to a disk (about 550 MB) to today, when I regularly as part of my creative side of my role, toss around files over a network that are as much if not larger than that, and it's barely an inconvenience. Yet the topic of "how do we monetize social media" utterly brings an otherwise brilliant community to a shrug.

I don't think you're entirely wrong, mind you, ad supported services are the default and any competing service that requires payment operates at a disadvantage, which is why I continuously come back to the idea that surveillance capitalism needs to be regulated. On a recent episode of Better Offline, the host interviewed an economist who has suggested a steep tax on digital ad spend, specifically to open the space to alternatives away from people giving away their privacy. I think that's a great idea, not as extreme as my ideal solution which would be the utter dismantling of surveillance capitalism entirely, but still.

The problem is money is literally the power here, as it is in most places, and the users are contributing none, and the advertisers are contributing all, and this is basically the source of every cancerous, inhumane and exploitative problem you can think of in social media. And you are 100% correct: a paid instagram will never succeed as long as instagram remains free. Then, IMO, the logical next step is we need to make it not free, or at the very least, take up some of that profit and put it towards other ends that we can actually affect change on.

"The market" is clearly incapable of solving social media, it only has made it worse, ever, ever worse. We need something else.

[verdverm]

> We need something else.

Have you looked into ATProto? (by Bluesky)

1. It separates the data, app, algo, and moderation into pluggable modules

2. You can build any app on top of it, all app user data ends up in the same user database (sqlite db per user)

3. They supposedly have a non-ad monetization plan, but haven't publicly announced what it is yet