Personally, I attribute this more to Wikipedia's non-commercial nature. It's goal has a clear end state because it isn't chasing endless growth that for-profit/vc-backed companies do.
I believe also it's possible to have a social media network that is non-commercial and is successful because it has no need to pump engagement to chase endless growth.
The specific attribute mentioned is the pressure to continue to grow, instead of executing a simple mission. Wikipedia doesn't do that at all, and clearly feels pressure to grow power and expand into new domains.
I believe any social site will inevitably devolve into spam and trolling, and arguments about why my poor behavior doesn't quite cross the line. It has to constantly solicit new content, even if it were completely devoid of financial goal, because it's fundamentally read-write.
Wikipedia aims for a read only state and will happily throw out any contribution even slightly out of line since that's not its mission. It's anti-social.
This belief is founded on a falsehood, specifically it rests upon some version of the popularised economic theory of the “tragedy of the commons”.
Short version. The original Tradgedy of the Commons paper that much modern economic theory rests upon and that is a key pillar that justifies the value of privatisation has found to have been made up.
Elinor Ostrom spent over 20 years debunking that there’s nothing you can do, and distilled a set of principals that any community can enact to protect and preserve a commons.
By example, here’s Mozilla led research on ‘A Practical Framework for Applying Ostrom’s Principles to Data Commons Governance’
> The original Tradgedy of the Commons paper that much modern economic theory rests upon
None of modern economic theory rests upon that paper. Literally the only thing that rests on it is the name of a scenario in game theory, and... it’s not even the dominant name, just an alternate for Prisoner’s Dilemma.
(A lot of social science, and not just economics, applies that scenario, but that doesn’t rest on the paper, but on rational choice theory, or some variation thereon.)
Privatisation is founded upon this (false) conception. In short due to the (false) “unavoidable tragedy of the commons”, our only choice is to have assets either privately owned or owned by the state.
This was what was espoused by the (debunked) paper and remains a pillar of contemporary neo-liberal ideology.
> Privatisation is founded upon this (false) conception
“Privatization” is a government policy, not “modern economic theory”, and to the extent that policy is based on that broad concept of a general effect of which the essay purported to document an example (rather than specific analysis of the ___domain being privatized), that essay is not the basis (it neither introduced the concept—which was much older—nor was is it the sole purported example).
> This was what was espoused by the (debunked) paper and remains a pillar of contemporary neo-liberal ideology.
It was a pillar of liberal ideology long before the essay was written, it never rested on the essay and, in any case, ideology isn’t the same as economic theory (Austrian school aside.)
> Pretty confident that a ‘Nobel Prize in Economics’ fits within ‘Modern economic theory’.
If you mean the 2009 one for work that included one of the many dismantlings of both the underlying essay you are you are talking about and the broader principal it addresses, sure, but that further rebuts, rather than supports, your argument that modern economic theory is based on that essay.
How exactly does "here's a set of rules that people can follow to share resources with minimal problems, it took two decades to figure out" count as a debunking of "sharing resources without an authority to impose rules tends to go badly"?
There have been other social information sites that failed not so much because of an explicit commercial angle but because any such site can easily be overrun by the grifter and scammers.
That is the irony to me. Good things seem to require a strong vision and discipline. This often comes from an individual forceful enough to maintain focus for the group.
I believe also it's possible to have a social media network that is non-commercial and is successful because it has no need to pump engagement to chase endless growth.