Ning, Substack, OnlyFans, Nostr, mirror.xyz, Farcaster are paid social networks, among others. It's been tried, with varying degrees of success based on user base.
But people are cheap as fuck. Even here we post links to archive.is to get around paywalls (which rubs me the wrong way). Every time YouTube Premium come up the comments are full of people saying they won't pay up.
I’m not going to pay for something and still be the product. These sites would have to be fundamentally different from what they are today, for me to justify paying for them, starting with: they should not be collecting, selling, or profiting off of data about me. They should also not be deciding for me what ways I can use their products.
People bemoan “nobody’s willing to pay for an online newspaper” and that’s true: they won’t pay for them in their current user-monetizing form. Same with YouTube: I’m not going to pay for an ad-free YouTube in its current form: with auto-playing next videos, algorithmic recommendations, Shorts, and sponsored content embedded in some creators’ videos. Give me a different, better product that does not try to monetize me, and I might pay for it.
But people are cheap as fuck. Even here we post links to archive.is to get around paywalls (which rubs me the wrong way). Every time YouTube Premium come up the comments are full of people saying they won't pay up.