Let me CHOOSE if I want to see "suggested" or "promoted" content. Have "followers only" and "monetized influencer crap" tabs. At least make it an option.
I remember getting access to Google+ first in my group of friends. I was up late and got in at like 1am. Nobody else was there. It was an absolute ghost town. No content anywhere. I thought, "wow I should treasure this moment. Soon and for the rest of time G+ will be filled with content!"
Of course you can start like that. Look all they need to do is pay MySpace Tom to come out of retirement and be everyone's first friend on Instagram threads.
Some will say, "well, why not Zuck?" Well, androids still have that uncanny valley effect and they're not quite as relatable.
Ok, I'll shoot: AOL Instant Messenger. Runaway success, 20ish year run. MySpace also started like that and so did Facebook itself. You had to add friends and visit their pages manually to see what they were up to, feeds came later.
It had group chats too, but still, the chat rooms themselves in AOL were ephemeral. No one knew who you were on AOL unless you let it be known, and you could make up a persona if you wanted.
As for word-of-mouth spread at Harvard about Facebook, well that's not different than anything else. Word of mouth is always a part of marketing for any product. You still needed to manually look up your friends or your friend's friends and even to see what was up you'd have to visit their profile (until the feed came out later). Facebook didn't start off by showing you thousands of people you didn't care about, it did the opposite, it wanted you to connect with people you knew IRL.
I would love it if some service did have an explicit option for the visibility of "monetized influencer crap". I'd be tempted to use them purely to reward their honesty.
Would be fun innit but in short time there would be hundreds complaining posts and deconstruction videos taking on why "monetized influencer crap" is problematic.
