What we need is something that isn&#x27;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.<p>Soundcloud is awesome. It&#x27;s needed, it&#x27;s culturally important but, it doesn&#x27;t make money. We should stop thinking of things like Soundcloud like business but, more like museums with infinite square footage.<p>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&#x27;s left is the thing that hackers aren&#x27;t great at, the cultural work of changing public perception.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t solved is funding and management.<p>There are so many services that would be wonderful to have but, will never be $1bn+ exits for anyone.<p>Twitter should be. IMHO I think it will be eventually.<p>Every social network gets abandoned once people put up ads. It&#x27;s pretty crazy that we live in a world where conversation, speech both personal and public are strip-mined for profit.<p>People will eventually realize that freedom costs something. Thankfully, technology should make that cost in dollars very cheap.<p>A Facebook scale social network could charge $1&#x2F;yr and pull in $1.5bn&#x2F;yr. A decentralized FB-scale network isn&#x27;t trivial both technically and socially but, it&#x27;s something that we as hackers should figure out.<p>A decentralized social network would be a huge win for freedom of speech, thought and information. Facebook already filters everything that people see. It&#x27;s a centralized, easily subpoena-able entity.<p>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.<p>The next problem is how do you build something that is wanted by society but, don&#x27;t do it by setting up a relationship with a VC looking to exit for 100X what they put in.<p>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.