The social media services like us to think the users (people with the pictures of kittens) don't add any value individually. The let us believe that it's the network effect, plus their infrastructure, that is the value, and because those wouldn't exist without the service, that is what generates revenue. But
of course individual users add value. Without people sharing their kitten pictures, there'd be no network, no
content, worth selling ads around.
For ad-supported social media, we're all just unpaid labor and we're told that labor has no value anyway.
Of course, by selling that position, they've also convinced the end user that the service is not worth paying for. But when there's nothing the end user wants to pay for, and ad revenue drying up, social media services will have to pivot to make money elsewhere.
The end result, not surprisingly, will result in a mixed model of subscription and ad revenue supporting content that the service has, in some way, paid for. Sound familiar? Of course, the end user will still not be paid for the labor contributed, but then the less the ad revenue depends on the user-generated "free" content, the closer the value of that labor tends to zero.