It's not as simple as that. I'd like to delete my Facebook account but it would be impossible to keep up with all my friends and family who don't use other platforms. Equally, Twitter is the platform for political and academic statements. You can cry "free market" but it's hard to argue there is no monopoly.

Then you create rules for interoperability for direct communications, you don't force sovereign private individuals or companies (groups of individuals) for how to set their algorithms - but you can take down the walls from between direct messaging apps/functionality.

Likewise if you did a UBI-like mechanism where everyone was allocated $100/year for digital services like Twitter/Facebook that would flood the market with revenue, non-manipulative ad based revenue too, and many more startups could survive and do R&D, etc. to help break up the monopoly which primarily exists through economies of scale - if people have $100/year though (or whatever amount is figured out to be minimum viable) then there's excess/buffer funds to cover higher bandwidth and computing costs of smaller competitors who can't compete on scale metrics.

There are likely additional options than these above, options other than taking away the sovereignty of official individuals/companies - which is a very dangerous path towards implementing mechanisms useful for tyranny - sovereignty being the diversification and de-risking counter mechanism to tyranny, allowing individuals to "vote" by which service(s) they decide to use.

The $100/year for digital services is mimicking the Democracy Dollars $100/year voucher policy idea of Andrew Yang, allowing all eligible voters to give $100/year to their candidate of choice, which will washout for-profit industrial complex lobbyist money 8:1 with money from citizens who will have far more diverse needs than lobbyists.

E.g. imagine how much innovation would occur on federated platforms like Mastodon if people had $100/year they could only allocate to such a service, and they didn't want to find Twitter or Facebook.

Otherwise to parrot your comment, in conclusion, it's even further "not as simple as that" - as in you need to design the system to counter tyranny as well, there needs to be balance maintained where freedom is what is outweighing control; and freedom will cost more than control - it's quality over quantity (economies of scale), necessary cost is something we shouldn't be hypersensitive to or hypervigilant for, however most of us are due to the now artificial scarcity mindset most of us have, where mechanisms like $1000/month UBI will allow us as an organism to destress, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and focus on/care about the more holistic, less focused on self and survival of only self.

Yep, I totally agree there are ways to make social media competitive, and you’ve given some good ideas. I hadn’t thought about a UBI style fund for social media. Not sure it would work in practise with the global nature of social networks, but cool idea

Platforms have the problem of scale. If I don't like how facebook or twitter are contributing to the information ecosystem I could go hang out on Gab or some other niche platform - but the tradeoff is that the people I want to interact with aren't there. These systems are inertial - while it is a great idea that future platforms should implement design choices that incentivize a well informed public and discourage conspiracy-mongering and misinformation that doesn't fix the issues with the current information ecosystem for years if not decades to come. Even if users were well informed about content moderation policies (they aren't), and users were rational actors (they're not), there are other goods involved that prevent that sort of ordered transition scenario. Frankly large scale platforms need to make significant changes to how they handle their role in information-space.