An anecdotal story about this - a couple of years ago I built a paid, ad-free privacy-focused social network, did several Show HNs for it and even here, in a community that seems quite receptive to the idea in principle, there was extremely low interest in it.

I got probably 50 sign-ups over a few Show HNs, no more than 4/5 upvotes and comments on the most well-received Show HN, and those who came in just posted one or two test posts, found obviously that nobody else was on there and left never to be seen again. Obviously none converted to a paid account (you could get 10 connections for free then afterwards pay $2/month).

Bootstrapping any social network, let alone a paid one, is hard. But I did try :-)

For a few months now I've been toying with the idea of a "mutual data fund." A social network that collects & anonymizes user data, pools the data on behalf of all users (similar to how a mutual fund pools investor cash), and the data is "invested" (sold to advertisers) by a management company (like an investment adviser) with the data always under the ownership and control of an independent Board of Trustees (same as a mutual fund). Just like a mutual fund, the "returns" from the data would be used to pay the investment adviser for operating costs + some flat % and the rest of the returns would be allocated to users on a pro-rata basis. So the people who use the platform more or share higher-quality content get more "shares" (the investment kind, not the social media kind) of the ad revenue than those who aren't on the site often or share fake news or just annoy the crap out of everyone else.

Most users probably wouldn't make a whole lot of money on the platform but they'd have privacy and ownership of their data and they might end up with $5 or $10 after a year on the platform.

It is super hard to bootstrap, but sites like Facebook and Twitter already have hundreds of millions of users. Can't they run an experiment - something like "no ads/tracking for $5 (or whatever amount) per month" and see if there are any takers? If 20M sign up, that is 100M revenue per month.

Maybe they considered it and then rejected it as not viable?

Or maybe they make more off of ads per month than they think any reasonable user would pay.

I’d be beyond shocked if even one percent of all Facebook users would pay $5/month for it. I think the only population of users who’d consider doing so are the intersection of those who are affluent (by Western standards), are extremely opposed to Facebook ads, and use it enough to consider paying for it.

I’d be surprised if you could get 1% of the US population of users to consider it, let alone the global population. You’d realistically be looking at single to very low double digit millions of users at the maximum.

And no one wants a social network with no friends on it.