>It’s clear based on user behavior that users like the experience that centralized, for-profit social media networks provide. I don't think this is a given, an

>It’s clear based on user behavior that users like the experience that centralized, for-profit social media networks provide. I don't think this is a given, and it's not that expensive to deliver either - the problem is more with the de facto monopoly of network position. But there are lags on all these kinds of activities, and user behaviour today, is conditioned on user experience yesterday, it may not predict well user behaviour in the future. Social media is still new, the experience of having it delivered to a mobile phone barely 10 years out of the box for most of the world. Consider a marketing team that predicted the future of the book by looking only at input from the reading habits of a kindergarten, and ignoring any correlation with how those would change as the kids got older. Note that none of this has anything to do with payment per se, and neither does today's social "advertising enabled" media.