The fundamental issue at hand (something you neglected to mention), most of these platforms twitter, instagram, facebook and youtube are free! Now what does free entail, you being the product and thus it will always spiral down to "increasing engagement/retention/active users per month". Basically you are getting a product that is too good for free. Someone has to bear the brunt of that cost and that person must be eventually rewarded otherwise there is no incentive to do so. So in reality the only way to solve this is a change in the users mentality of always jumping to free then crying foul about it when they end up the product. So the real problem(your problem) here is the user's mentality. You are basically just complaining about human nature from the users to the developers of said platforms.