I suppose it's not that it would require a subscription necessarily, just that you would need to find a way to make the income stream align with positive end user outcomes.

At the end of the day, money runs companies, and keeps employees well, employed. If their month-to-month goals and KPIs internally revolve around "how do we make the most money via ads and selling user data"... that's what got us here. It's a very "road to hell is paved with good intentions" situation. The individual contributors, the actual coders, didn't sit down to architect this exploitative mental health mess that social media became. It got built slowly commit by commit, due to the profit focus being what it is.

Change to goals, change to outcome. Make the money come from delivering a superior customer experience, and the app will trend in that direction.