For one thing this is the mother of all two-sided markets.
I made my own content-based recommender which only needs 2000 judgements from me to work really well. If I wanted to make a social network of some kind I am going to need thousands if not millions of users, with the exception that there is some room for products like discord where somebody makes a private instance which will not need to get that big. In the past, people who started social networks and communication apps of various kinds would use spammy tactics to get enough users to have a scene. Today I think it’s a lot harder to do that and when companies try to jumpstart the process, like TikTok or Temu, they spend hundreds of millions or more on advertising.
I made my own content-based recommender which only needs 2000 judgements from me to work really well. If I wanted to make a social network of some kind I am going to need thousands if not millions of users, with the exception that there is some room for products like discord where somebody makes a private instance which will not need to get that big. In the past, people who started social networks and communication apps of various kinds would use spammy tactics to get enough users to have a scene. Today I think it’s a lot harder to do that and when companies try to jumpstart the process, like TikTok or Temu, they spend hundreds of millions or more on advertising.