Excellent post Bohdan. From the past discussions in this forum, seems it’s a mix of both the attention economy and human nature. Since human nature is an important part, many people in this forum have said if we make another social network that it should be unlike the current ones. Some people have even said that we shouldn’t make another social network, but something different that would replace it. Even if we change the business model, human nature will not change so that means surely changing the type of network altogether to facilitate better communication, fewer negatives and so on.
One thing that’s rarely discussed here are business models. In fact many kinds of social networks and other kinds of new projects have been already tried endless times and failed. These projects are hard to find because they’re very small and disappear. But it’s possible to search them out and not repeat previous mistakes. It is rarely the case that we actually need to build anything at all to see if something will work – almost always researching the issue thoroughly will provide the evidence of why these projects fail or are unable to make enough revenue to support sustainable development and growth.
I think the best bet to knock out Facebook would be a radical change in technology, which is why I’ve been trying to find new Technologies, protocols and standards for a better future Web that would decentralise apps and make them modular, and let people maintain all of their own data among other things.