evidence: Unlike most other businesses on Earth that live and die by their customers’ demands, social media services are caught trying to satisfy both their users and the people actually paying for it all: investors and advertisers. [...] At some earlier stage, or at some smaller scale, I do believe people would be willing to pay for social products that serve them. But these products rarely get built because investors simply aren’t interested in putting money toward "small scale social" that better reflects our IRL social networks. It’s simply a far less lucrative business model than the one Mark Zuckerberg came up with all those years ago. [...] However, the promise of ads may simply be too good to turn down. Advertisers are simply willing to pay more for the product than its actual users. In Facebook’s case, the company makes something like $200 per year of ad revenue on each American user, but how many of those users would pay $15 / month to use Facebook? According to one study, not many.