What we need is something that isn't centralized. The problem that needs to be solved is how to pay for the things that you care about but, keep enough in a common pot to not only share the service but, to make systems for discovery.
Soundcloud is awesome. It's needed, it's culturally important but, it doesn't make money. We should stop thinking of things like Soundcloud like business but, more like museums with infinite square footage.
We can pay the artists as patrons directly, we can pay tour guides who show us interesting and amazing things. We have decent micropayments. What's left is the thing that hackers aren't great at, the cultural work of changing public perception.
Most artists just want to eat, pay rent and live well enough to create more art. I love that Soundcloud allowed people to experiment, get good enough to book gigs and then I could see them live.
What we need is a system that does that efficiently. We need a better managerial structure than VCs + Founders. Soundcloud is a pretty solved problem, both technology wise and UI wise. What isn't solved is funding and management.
There are so many services that would be wonderful to have but, will never be $1bn+ exits for anyone.
Twitter should be. IMHO I think it will be eventually.
Every social network gets abandoned once people put up ads. It's pretty crazy that we live in a world where conversation, speech both personal and public are strip-mined for profit.
People will eventually realize that freedom costs something. Thankfully, technology should make that cost in dollars very cheap.
A Facebook scale social network could charge $1/yr and pull in $1.5bn/yr. A decentralized FB-scale network isn't trivial both technically and socially but, it's something that we as hackers should figure out.
A decentralized social network would be a huge win for freedom of speech, thought and information. Facebook already filters everything that people see. It's a centralized, easily subpoena-able entity.
The larger, much harder problem is how do you convince teenage girls to join a service. They are both the heavy users and set the communication norms for the next generation.
The next problem is how do you build something that is wanted by society but, don't do it by setting up a relationship with a VC looking to exit for 100X what they put in.
Once we solve those two issues, social and funding then the world will very quickly become a place where we can build things that are self-sustaining, less link rot, less invasion of privacy, less filtering of thought and speech by centralized powers.