Actually I wonder if there’s a market for an actual social network that is restricted to only being social.
Maybe you can only have 100 connections and you can’t post links or rants. Just life updates and photos.
There's a huge market for them. They're called private group chats, and they're popular everywhere. The problem is that you can't make much money off of that, precisely because they're socially valuable (i.e., they're strictly socially-driven, so there's no opportunity for in-line advertising, or recommending "new connections").
The problem I most often experience with group chats is that not everyone's on the same platform (excepting SMS) but old fashioned social media has that issue too. They also don't scale super well to large clubs or organizations, where I think having topic-oriented posts or threads as the default becomes valuable.
I consider the inability to do this a feature, not a bug. Group chats are socially segmented, with friction between those segments. That crazy uncle who loves conspiracy theories will be confined to just the group chats you have in common. You don't get insufferable loudmouths at scale, amplified by social media reward structures and algorithms.
They used to be social networks until they got littered with short-term engagement boosting content and ads. Facebook in 2006/2007 was so awesome.
It demonstrably reduces happiness and life satisfaction. It’s just bad.
And it’s easy to quit. Really.
Even later the groups function was great for many.
On balance it’s been bad, but it has its moments in the sun.
It was also a desktop experience so it wasn’t nearly as potent as it was when the smartphone showed up
I believe Path tried to do this too, and failed.
Many I’ve been exposed to wouldn’t know what to post if it wasn’t regurgitated content or rants.
We could go back to the early days of Facebook and Twitter: “I’m having toast! And it’s not burned!”
It could be an improvement.