Solution: people pay to use twitter. Kill advertising as the main model.
Either Twitter will do this or the future decentralized apps will do this naturally through micropayments of having to pay for compute through the network.
I see a distributed p2p database that costs money to interact with and anyone can build a client for it. Go ahead, build a client - maybe it's free, maybe it costs money because it uses the protocol really well and people like it the UX. Hell, maybe even the client has advertisements in it. Either way interacting with the actual content costs money and that will naturally bring in a balance of information. Right now we have information asymmetry exploited by advertising.
This gets suggested as the solution to privacy/junk content/etc for every social platform - why have none of them (that I am aware of) adopted this model?
Shooting from the hip but—VC. Specifically, valuation models and investment horizons for social networking services that run on UGC.
The totally free ad-supported model is really the only one that has the potential to generate both the user growth and ARPU growth to create those 10x-1000x exits, and do so within a reasonable horizon for the fund that's investing in the company. If you start a service that costs money to the end user, you remove the addiction to engagement to drive ARPU, but you risk cratering your user growth, or at least set your growth on a scale that will be unimpressive at best for venture backers.
So platforms stay free and tolerate those community problems, because the user growth is attractive, and if you can make the ad dollars work, you can show good revenue potential and get that spicy multiple.
If you look at it a certain way, this is what email was before ISPs and bigcorps gave away email addresses; everyone who had an email address was paying their sysadmin for the privilege of having one (through their tuition at a university that has email services, or through the cost-center of the company they work for.) In either of those cases, people were more careful with email, because postmasters were easily angered (and this was, in turn, because causing trouble could actually get your system kicked off the network!)
In modern times, people pay to use Slack. It'd be interesting to study the sociology of paid Slack groups (as compared to free Slack groups, or as compared to any other free-for-everyone group chat platform.)
I've always thought it'd be a cool idea to have a group chat platform where, rather than some admin owning the group and maybe paying, the group has a tip-jar and anyone/everyone in the group can contribute. (Twitch sort of works like this, but you're really donating to the channel owner, not to the group itself. In my hypothetical model, there is no channel owner; the group persists because at least some of the user-base want it to, and so pay for it to.)
Today, you learned about Something Awful[0], a social forum that charges a nominal fee for accounts[1]. After being banned by administrators, a rule-breaker must pay another fee if they wish to be reinstated.
It's not going so well, maybe because there's no recurring fees. Lowtax had to start a patreon after some medical bills lately.
Not sure what the atmosphere is like these days, but the admins were always so constantly mad for no reason you couldn't even post in a thread next to them or they'd ban you. They have real bad irony poisoning.
One issue is there's a huge number of fake/bot accounts on the site that won't be subscribing. Since twitter is a public company, shareholders would not be pleased with loosing a huge swath of user base as it would indicate they've been deceived on the scope of their investment the whole time.
Either Twitter will do this or the future decentralized apps will do this naturally through micropayments of having to pay for compute through the network.
I see a distributed p2p database that costs money to interact with and anyone can build a client for it. Go ahead, build a client - maybe it's free, maybe it costs money because it uses the protocol really well and people like it the UX. Hell, maybe even the client has advertisements in it. Either way interacting with the actual content costs money and that will naturally bring in a balance of information. Right now we have information asymmetry exploited by advertising.