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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jian" data-source="post: 9877331" data-attributes="member: 78087">And it’s greatly appreciated, thank you.It does take me to another thought, which is that are benign social media companies such as EN World or other forums profitable? If not, why would anyone run them apart from the love of the game and community? If they charged a tiny subscription to stay solvent, how many people would still use them?I think we can all remember when some of the more toxic social media platforms used to be more benign, but AFAIK they weren’t making any profit then, and in retrospect they were being run as loss leaders to build a user base to prepare for more profitable approaches such as data extraction. Perhaps they shouldn’t be run at all if that’s the only way they can stay afloat.Yet another question is, what would a world without Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, X, Bluesky etc look like? It’s easy for me to say “more like the 90s when I grew up” but that’s obviously not true. It means, for instance, that nobody can play the influencer social media lottery. It means that it will be a lot harder for some communities to find each other online. What would we lose and how can it be preserved?</blockquote>