welp it was a nice try but I guess the internet really isn't built to have anything complex last
tbh I've been thinking about it and honestly social media just does not appear to be profitable at all. just consider the biggest examples, dig even the slightest bit down and you quickly notice that their actual business is either:
- selling space of dubious value to advertisers, or
- exorbitant privacy breaches
sometimes both. ...usually both
people like having a place to chat with random other people and stuff but in the world of economics (ANY economics, not just capitalism) what value is there in that to begin with. so if we want to avoid those top two monetization schemes (because they're awful) we have to go to crowdfunding the promise that we're A Thing that people want instead and well, I can look at tumblr and reddit being on constant fire, there's always a great example of how much of a gap you need to clear from twitter chasing away nearly all its advertisers. we only start getting successful in that model when we shift away from social media. closest is the content creator sites with individual subscriptions and even there there's caveats; youtube was a loss leader for google for ages before they even tried that (I THINK it's profitable on its own merits now? I forget), twitch seems to be in a never-ending state of constant blunders, patreon definitely gets worse and worse every time I am forced to hear about it, and I don't know anything about places like onlyfans lol
even if these work out you do still need constant growth because social media sites tend to not delete things so the storage amounts and related costs just keep going up and up and up but you're probably not getting a proportionate increase in revenue
there's probably a lot of people here older than me (I'm 31) but I am old enough to remember the BBS era of the internet. tons of smaller communities just doing their own shit. that's definitely cheaper because you're not keeping as much data and vbulletin is still in business so I guess it's still working to a degree but the smaller communities meant they were doomed to become niche when bigger sites came along and promised even bigger Numbers
idk where I'm going with this
