Public networks have value for entertainment, movies, TV, and music all should be sponsored by social media apps, especially independent music. These social apps also need to abandon the predatory and destructive (ad boosting) schemes they've created and instead tax big (and very profitable) media companies alone.
Undercover the truth has been that social media has always been simply a channel for commercials, and they should embrace that truth and make it les sof a ponzi scheme, and more of an easy way to scroll through specific areas of interest for individual people. If social media was honest and fair, the metrics on consumer sentiment would be game-changingly valuable to everyone in business, but as of right now, pure corruption, deceptive marketing, and endless new schemes are being invented by people trying to leverage social media against the unaware masses on it.
Closed networks can be just as easily corrupted, and they can be weaponized against users with no way of anyone knowing what occurred. Closed systems can hide valuable knowledge and truth from the public, they create a nightmare for law enforcement as well in solving crimes perpetrated on groups or individuals, they also encourage maintaining multiple individual accounts and paywalls around data that does not need to be private... Neither solution is perfect. Many of the massive public social media services have been operating as if they are closed networks lately as they try to squeeze money and data out of users over time (e.g. Twitter not allowing posts to be accessed without having an account).
I am really tired myself of all the tricks, gimmics, and schemes that social media creates jus tin order to operate successfully on it, and new tools are often the same old schemes, but in reality, there is now barely any other cost-effective way to promote yourself to the world... Google search can also be kind of considered the same as social media in a way because many have to pay for prominent placing and manipulate keywords, and even do things like registering an SSL cert and pay hosting to be ranked higher on results... TikTok has basically become a massive video search engine on the flip side of that.
The problem is these networks thrive on free and coerced labor form content creators and businesses, they offer little reward for hard work, and they facilitate wide-scale fraud, info theft, ID impersonation, and disinformation. Those things need to be addressed thoroughly moving forward, or it will all turn into a desolate strip mall with little value to anyone but the land owners.