[m-p-3]

There's a chicken and egg issue with the rise of a social media.

You can't get people to join if there isn't a lot of people, and there isn't a lot of people because nobody joins.

Faking the participants 'till you make it is cheating, compared to an organic growth that rarely happens at the inception of a new platform.

[yepthatsreality]

I don’t agree with this. There is only a chicken and egg issue if the people joining are the product. You can’t sell product data if it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of product to be sold. If social networks required paid membership, small amount of total users wouldn’t be a bug it’d be a feature.

[m-p-3]

I personally don't see a social media platform that would succeed through a mandatory paid membership. The main interest in social media to the majority of user is the reach and read a large amount of users, and keeping it small and exclusive might not be an attractive feature to a majority.

[yepthatsreality]

I agree and disagree. One hand it’s free to signup and post whatever to my personal account and like a few pages. However the “reach” argument breaks down when the social media company starts filtering what a I do and don’t see. If I decide I want public reach too then I have to buy an ad space from the social media company for that reach. So if that’s true then the reach you get is a lie and you have to pay for membership anyways.