this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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In what way is slow growth incompatible with anything that requires network effects?
Because this will only become interesting once we have a critical mass. 50k MAU is far from if. If we grow 10% YoY, we will certainly lose out to someone else who is willing to grow faster.
Makes some sense, but market ownership doesn't only go up, it goes down too. Services absolutely have downturns as well, and that's what we're really relying on. Like, reddits troubles the past year, for instance.
Also, note, we still have user-facing issues to resolve. This platform in its current form has a limited appeal to non-techy people. That won't change until the front-end gets more development and features. As it stands, average non-techy user pokes around a little bit and goes "ehhhh", and it's not necessarily due to a lack of content. That's just a singular factor.
For all "Reddit's troubles" last year, they still managed to have revenue growth of 21% to more than $800 million.
I really disagree. Yeah, there are many issues to solve, but content is king and we simply don't have it. The current experience with Lemmy can be summarized as:
It's only appealing for the terminally online. There is nothing for normies to be minimally curious about. The reason that, e.g, my wife, still has Facebook installed and never cared about installing a Lemmy client is not because of "technical challenges" but Facebook has groups that she likes to follow and nothing interesting to her here.
Your assessment of Lemmy content seems to indicate you follow news and Fediverse communities.
Truly diverse content will come with the users, the users make the content, not the content making the users. You need something with the polish, simplicity and ease-of-use the average public expects though.
Fediverse communities, yes. "News", not at all.
See how fast the number of active users drop.
So we agree that we need to have more users, no?
Need more cat pics communities.
Yes, I think we can agree on that. Our disagreement involves what will bring them, I do not think more content alone would be sufficient.
I have actual data that support the idea that more content can create a virtuous cycle. People loved to complain about alien.top "spamming their feed", but when the mirror bots were active, the numbers of "organic participation" and subscriber count was increasing faster than the most popular communities on the bigger instances. I kept quiet about it to avoid "inverse Streisand effect" (like the haters pontificating about "these communities are only bots" and spoiling for those who actually didn't care about interacting with it).
Sounds like a correlation. Note, I'm not saying content quantity has no impact. I said several comments ago it is a factor. So, that it means I think it is a factor. It's just one though.
And don't get me wrong, it's an important one too. But not the most important imo. It is, however, one we can influence, so that's nice.