Social networks cannot exist and not devolve on today’s internet. Here is why:

1. They cannot be monetized via anything but ads. Sure a few people will pay for access to a social network. But the majority will not pay $0.01 because the friction of the transaction will prevent them. Moreover, an SN operator can make a lot more money from ads than from subscriptions, at least until proven otherwise. As a result any useful value that an SN provides will quickly be overtaken by more and more intrusive ads.

2. General purpose social networks are relatively boring. I mean how often do you actually hang out with a proportional representation of the general public? No, we want topic or interest based social networks. We want to form consumer tribes, political tribes, sports tribes, etc. We want to talk to people from our school, work, neighborhood, yoga practice, etc.

3. All that is overshadowed by the fact that most people straight up don’t have anything interesting to say. Think of the average person. Do you expect them to wow you with what they are working on even once a month? Chances are, most people will post pictures of their lunch or repost a stupid meme that they finally discovered. Twitter sort of solves this by letting you follow leaders in their fields, but still the SNR is so low that it’s really difficult to find meaningful interactions and unless you are one of those leaders nobody gives a crap about what you shout into the void.

The only thing I can see being a path forward is small communities forming their own very limited in size networks with some common authentication platform to help people jump between them. Discord is sort of that, but far cry from a sustainable model.