Imagine a parallel universe where social network’s interests and the interests of its users were actually aligned—all because paid social was seen as the norm from get go. Fully featured APIs? Multi-platform third-party messaging clients? Ethical privacy policies? Once the end user is able to vote with their money, so many possibilities suddenly open.

The status quo is much more preferable to social networks and their shareholders, of course. Charging advertisers arbitrary amounts based on eyeball count no one can actually verify, while not having to worry about losing paying customers due to ignoring requests of locked-in users, is a nice position to be in.

To the point about market regulation, IMO there may be a place for a limited, surgically precise yet not targeting any specific companies intervention (for example, “you are obligated to provide an API covering the entirety of your GUI features if you serve more than N users”) that would, a few causal links down the line, break such shockingly dysfunctional customer-provider relationships, normalize paid social and let the market do its thing.