Instagram tests forcing users to watch adverts
bbc.com
bbc.com
Web services constantly treat users poorly, further encouraging them not to pay.
Advertising is an established and "accepted" way to make tons of money.
We're just going to keep seeing this pattern of a new service being released, users adopting without paying, companies resorting to user hostile ways of making money, and users eventually abandoning the product for a new one.
How much would it cost to fund an open source alternative ecosystem? Much less than it costs to run Instagram/tiktok/Facebook...
Lots of people were throwing this out there when twitter got bought by Musk, like "how hard is it to build a twitter clone anyway?"
Incredibly difficult and expensive at scale. Aside from infrastructure costs and maintenance, which would be considerable, you'd also have the content moderation problem which can spiral out of control quickly depending on which locality's laws you are possibly violating (it's different everywhere), etc. Many many millions of dollars at least, and to get to IG/Facebook scale with billions of daily users, I'd wager a lot more.
It already exists in the form of the Fediverse. You have alternatives to twitter (mastodon), reddit (lemmy), youtube (peertube), instagram (pixelfed) and others, all interconnected but distributed, open source, and without ads. Apparently it costs less than 100$ a month to run a fairly large instance, but I imagine that cost would grow as the Fediverse as a whole continues growing. It's not without its downsides, but it's there.
They might provide you some kind of mental entertainment, but certainly don’t tangibly benefit you (the nourishment of fine dining not withstanding).
It's been exceptionally terrible at this for a long, long time now. For instance - had a friend I hadn't talked to in a while (as happens as you grow older, sometimes you only talk to people every 1-2 years but remain friendly) died recently. It popped up in my feed, somewhat as a shock to me - he had had cancer for the last year. Now, it's definitely on me for not keeping in contact more frequently, but I was shocked at how many updates about it I saw on his page that never once made it to my feed. Facebook didn't think a guy I'd been friends with on the platform for a decade and had 200+ mutual connections was anything I'd be interested in. It's explicitly anti-social by design.
As for the other things in your list, I've never found any value to any of that but I acknowledge some might. I also don't think you need a platform like FB/IG to do either of those things and the only value they provide is the network effect.
Instagram provides a high latency poor resolution picture and short video service with comments, which you can get from anyone and everyone on today's web.
Relying on a billionaire to subsidize losses out of the goodness of his heart because he believes in the importance of a free and open virtual public square is not a sustainable business model. Nor is relying on advertisers who demand ever more intrusive ads and ever more censorship of opinions they dislike. Nor is relying on subscriptions because a platform that excludes people who don't pay isn't useful. So maybe it is a public good that needs to be run by either the government or a charity that rich people fund to get out of paying taxes?
Regardless, a neutral social media platform where people can speak to the general public and say what they believe without any favoritism on the part of the platform towards any viewpoint is as essential for maintaining democracy in the 21st century as the free press was in the 18th and 19th centuries and as the Fairness Doctrine for television and radio was in the 20th century. Society has to find a way to make that happen in a manner that can be sustained permanently.
And then the users will flock to the new product anyway, as you said. But with paying for a subscription it's just more money ending up where it shouldn't: in the hands of corporations.
People pay for Prime. It got stuffed full of ads.
People pay for Netflix. It -- surprisingly but shouldn't have been? -- got ads.
Some services even try to eliminate the paid ad-free version. (To ensure ad audience demographic includes people that buy things?)
It's not clear that people don't want to pay for subscriptions as much as providers don't want to leave ad money on the table.
It's not entirely the users' fault, but people need to learn to be smart consumers -- er, participants -- because many business leaders and techies have conflicts of interest wrt an open Web.
While there are a number of enthusiasts willing to put up with the cost and time to run a service with the general public, it's not sustainable either.
How many people actually chipped in to pay for hosting costs 15 years ago?
I don't know what capital-O "Open Web" is. Unfortunately, "distributed" has been tainted by cryptographic token scammers.
I mean start with the original ideas of the Web, and go from there.
Things don't have to look like centralized grabs of user eyeballs (along with moderation), proprietary or not.
Some more discussion among others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40574912