Users may not want to pay for myriad of reasons, like unfair competition, or competition of lower quality where the user can't clearly determine the quality they receive, preconditioning and other existing biases, and so on.
How do you think our media found themselves in a continued decline over the last few decades? They were paid, but they had to focus on online presence and ads as low-quality blogs and fake news replaced them. People don't want to pay for quality journalism, because they can't tell the difference. This doesn't mean quality journalism doesn't provide value.
Furthermore, ads by themselves are not a bad service in our world. It's basically a business saying "hey I'm here, I have this to offer, if you want it". Is that such a bad concept? Of course there are scams, and so on. But that's not INHERENT to ads right? It's one thing to fight for higher quality ads, another to hate ads entirely.
As always there is a loud but tiny minority that thinks all ads are bad. Most of us (I assume) think ads are mostly fine but tracking is bad.
This is a lie to children. It's like saying the decision to drop nuclear bombs in WWII was made to bring Japan to surrender and not a show of force to Russia. It's simply a false dichotomy.
Ads exist to maximize profit and its done by pushing individual rights back. Nobody voted to give up privacy to the government or private sector.
The answer to your burning question is simple: people don't give a shit about your product or your ad. Sheep are shaped by what they see. You're paying for a stake in the perverse attention economy.
And I think that's exactly what would happen.
Freemium dating sites let you use the most basic features for free, but to actually reach more than a few potential dates, you have to pay.
Freemium social media might also do the same. For free, maybe you get sent to just a few of your closest friends. For money, you can be sent to all your friends and random strangers.
And perhaps you have access to flashier messages and better icons. Perhaps meme/picture posting is limited for free.
It's easy to think that the users would just go elsewhere, but if Facebook can't afford to operate without tricks like that, smaller sites have even less chance.
And once that door is opened, it quickly gets wider and wider. Look at DLC and IAP in games now. It used to be non-existent. And then "horse armor" appeared and sold like hotcakes, despite all the protests. From there, we ended up with gacha games that absolutely abuse people with certain mental instabilities, often when they have money to burn, but often even when they don't.
As much as I hate ads, I'd hate to see social media get worse.
Only professional influencer would need to pay in this kind of model that doesn't seem all that bad to me.
If you’re serious about dating, you could afford to spend $10 a month. Most people can make $10 in less than an hour of work. You could probably afford $40 dollars a month easily. Don’t worry, your actual dates will probably cost you more than that and often you’ll get nothing in return...
People have been sucking on the teet of free social media for so long that the thought of even paying a couple dollars for something makes them feel they are buying a luxury good, when you are literally just giving up some pocket change.
Meanwhile, they buy $5 lattes and $10 burgers a few times a week and pay god knows how much for a myriad of streaming services, without a second thought.
It could be the opposite.
The ambitions of social media operators need to be downsized. One of the most salient data points is that WhatsApp served a half billion users with 50 employees when they were acquired by Facebook. And reportedly they were profitable at that point by charging $1 per user per year after the first year. By 2018 Signal had already made a substantial entry into the messaging market with [only 2.3 FTE engineers on average](https://signal.org/blog/signal-foundation/) (I'm not sure on the current headcount but I'm guessing it's still on the order of magnitude of the WhatsApp numbers), and it is self-sustaining based largely on a $50m endowment provided by one individual (Brian Acton, not ironically the co-founder of WhatsApp).
It's totally conceivable that for the type of social media that people prefer (no algorithm in the timeline, no tracking, etc.) a very small organization could provide it.
Could the Signal foundation develop a competitor to Twitter or Facebook, or could the social features and groups in apps like Signal or Telegram (also a relatively small team) continue to chip away at the jobs that people hire Facebook for? I don't see a strong argument against this.
Andrew Carnegie decided to put libraries in cities all across America because he thought he could make a major contribution to the needs of the day through improving access to literacy and self-education to those who otherwise couldn't afford it. From what I can tell [Brian Acton](https://www.forbesindia.com/article/special/i-am-the-david-g...) is doing the same by ensuring that private communication is free and available to even the least amongst us. Why would we assume that we'll see less and not more of this sort of thing?
> Acton: In some ways, I'm the David going against the Goliath that I created. I think that I stand on my principles the most, having been in the industry and seeing how the industry has developed around advertising and behaviour-tracking and user-tracking, I’m here to stand on my principles and present alternatives. I’m not going to just say the world should be a different place. I’m actually going to try and build the world a better place and that’s why I wake up every morning. That’s why I go to work every morning and that’s why I don't sit on a beach and sip cocktails.