That seems to be how social media services die. Too many ads, fewer users, revenue drop, more ads to boost revenue, still fewer users, irrelevance. This is called "pulling a Myspace".
1. The growing social media platform balances the needs of two user groups: the consumer’s need for fresh content and the neophyte producer’s need for a slowly ramping trickle of validation. This is possible because the people don’t know how to produce content in the new format yet.
2. The mature social media platform has picked winners. We know who the successful youtubers are, the successful twitch streamers, etc., and they know how to create the optimal media for their platform. At this point we’re maximally satisfying consumer demand, but we’re actively repelling the neophyte producers because the bar is now too high. They form a growing untapped market for the next social media platform.
3. Decay. A competing platform has stolen the limelight by restoring the dynamism of the consumer/producer balance. The successful producers of the platform start flexing out to the new upstart, though they’re unlikely to repeat their successes there, they’re too late to the game and bound to old habits. Chasing feature parity with the new platform does nothing because now you’re just upsetting the existing balance but that’s not suddenly going to pull new people into the game, they’ve already written you off.
The problem is you start following strangers which causes the app to transforms itself to promote strangers over friends and family to meet monthly usage goals. It’s a viscous cycle.
There should be a way to speed up this cycle to make them fail faster. These corporations are making way too much money selling off our attention to the highest bidder as if it was their property.
One day someone smarter than me will make some machine learning thing that deletes brands from videos in real time.
Arguably, it should not be a tax-deductible business expense for businesses. At least not beyond, say, 20% of cost of goods sold.
Also, it's just not feasible to say 'let me pay money to not see ads'. You can pay for netflix, youtube, google search.. but what about the long-tail of all the sites you visit? I think Brave or somebody tried solving it with micro transactions but automatically deducting money also does not work that way because most of the content is trash I would not be happy to pay $0.005 for.
Paying any amount of money just drives up the value of your attention. If you can afford to pay off the advertising platform, then you obviously have enough disposable income to waste on the products the advertisers wants to sell to you. In the end, you're helping them segment the market and paying for the privilege.
In YouTube's case, you're paying to avoid ads but you're still being advertised to since videos now have hardcoded sponsored segments. You're also being constantly tracked by Google's surveillance. So you're still gonna have to use uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock if you want to avoid advertising or tracking.
Instead of wasting time watching annoying ads.
I think it’s a great deal.
One way is to consciously leach off them. Use their resources while blocking all of their user tracking and display of advertising. A strategy somewhat stymied however by people who consider it their 'moral duty' to allow themselves to be brainwashed by advertising so as to 'support' these companies.
It's ridiculous when I see the "moral duty" argument. Moral duty my ass, they aren't entitled to a thing. Actually it's our moral duty and imperative to oppose such corporate abuses. We are not cattle to be sold to the highest bidder. This neo-techno-feudalism bullshit must end.
AdNauseam is also an ingenious idea since it actually costs them money and directly drives down their returns on investment. Advertising should have negative returns.
I am, thereby, going to claim that, if you are getting nothing but half naked women on Instagram on your feed, it is because you actually "wanted" to see half naked women (...maybe "merely" subconsciously! as, while I am not entirely sure about Instagram, TikTok is apparently tracking implicit watch time more so than explicit actions, and maybe you stop for just a bit longer on such content as it catches your eye).
In contrast to your experience, I recently went through a devastating breakup, and my algorithmic Instagram feed seriously has no half naked women on it: it is, instead, nothing but an intense pile of captioned voices (like, an audio with text, but not video of that person) saying pseudo-motivational quotes about relationships ("if she had wanted to make time, she would have" sort of shit) with inspirational background music overlapped with videos of people "making stuff" (such as carpentry).
It is demoralizing to experience: I go into Instagram for whatever reason, start scrolling by accident, and then a half hour later I am at the bottom of a pit of emotions crying my eyes out while clutching a pillow and I am lucky if I escape even an hour after that :(... but, the algorithm does't care about my mental health: it only knows that if it shows me videos that cluster along these axes I apparently am willing to spend the rest of my life watching ads (which make up about 1/4th of the content on Instagram).
In my experience, you can clean up your feed of unwanted content pretty quickly. Just go to discover and long tap > "Not Interested" on the stuff that's of the genre you want to filter out of your life.
I do this every couple months with IG babes & thot accounts to keep my feed free of sexual imagery. Works a charm.
I just checked right now, I scrolled through 10 posts of accounts that I follow, which took 30 seconds, before getting "You're all caught up" and having literally only spam posts.
And I don't even go on Instagram every day.
I didn't realize how big an impact that had, till I tried Mastodon. No ads, no patterns to try to keep you online longer. Just posts from who you follow.
What's worse is apparently cell and bluetooth tracking of all customers in realtime is becoming more common. So retailers can optimize their floor layouts so you have to go through as much of the store as possible to get what you want. Trying to stretch out the experience, show you the most ads/products, and lower the signal to noise down close to zero, just like ad driven social media.
Well, I certainly will never ever miss FB but those contacts would be nice to preserve somehow...
Maybe that's "pulling a Tom from MySpace"