I think the universe of topic-driven forums is the best I've seen so far. What eventually wrecks any of the "meet friends/family/strangers and chat loosely" My

I think the universe of topic-driven forums is the best I've seen so far. What eventually wrecks any of the "meet friends/family/strangers and chat loosely" MySpace/Facebook/Google+/etc. networks toxic is that they're "unbounded" to serve their business model. They want to show 50% quarter-over-quarter active-user growth, and when that caps out, they need to squeeze the user bases for ever more interaction and engagement. Quality is not on the radar. So they're incentivized first to load the site with bots, desperate virality and recruitment efforts, and low-quality content, and later more and more obnoxious algorithms and dark-pattern design. A topic-driven forum tends to have different motivations. The definition of success is to be a compelling community and content for a specific, and typically finite, audience. You're not going to growth-hack Hacker News or Deskthority in quite the same toxic way as Facebook does. A small, but tighter-knit community often can be self-funded via subscriptions or donations, and if you go ad supported, there's a potential for a high-quality non-programmatic-nightmare ad experience, based on direct relations with advertisers directly relevant to the site theme and audience. There's also granularity and control created by it not being a single all-purpose systen. Each new community is an opt-in choice rather than an algorithmic imposition, and you can punt the toxic ones without having to delete them all.