Hype has its down-sides.
There is a whole cult as it were of folk who are all about quantity over quality, and they are not always wrong.
Occasionally "if you get them to come then you can build it" does at least give an appearance of working.
In a way it seems a natural extrapolation from watching which aspects your users go for and putting more effort/resources into those aspects than into your own in-advance thoughts on where best to focus.
Startup culture certainly seems to agree with such approaches but of course startup culture, along with Venture Capital culture, is exactly where one gets the impression of cult as it were.
The kinds of things I am thinking of as down-sides might not seem downers at all to many or even most of you...
Take a look at the culture of
DMD Diamond, I have been following them since before the fall of Cryptsy (a defunct "crypto exchange"), I even installed telegram for them which is probably a totally stupid thing to do since the damn thing isn't even open source at all let along free open source.
I haven't been firing up discord and [uh I forget the other one] so not even sure anymore whether their mirror bot still mirrors the chats across the supposedy popular chat platforms anymore but likely you don't have to resort to using telegram just to get onto the DMD project chat to observe the culture I am referring to.
Free Open Source culture, basically?
If you are of the other cult, referred to first in this post, then likely you'll also (or instead, ha ha) characterise this other flavour of culture as an as it were cult.
So hey, for completeness how about we characterise not of either cult as being the cult of mainstream?
Are you able to conceive milieus where "oh gosh I hope the mainstream and likely even the cult of startup/VC culture does not catch on that we have so many millions of users" is the norm rather than (as, likely, within the other cults) seeming somehow "weird" or "counterproductive"?
Think more deeply upon it though and maybe you can even conceive cases where VC culture (though maybe not necessarily startup culture) might agree on that point: cases, for example, where copycats could potentially be detrimental to the project's goals and thus, if there is somehow already VC involvement, detrimental to VC goals.
Free Open Source culture, of course, does not always hold to a "build it and they will come" narrative; often it is more along the lines of "build it and we can use it, who cares whether anyone else ever uses it?"
Bitcoin was like that, wasn't it?
Did we
really care back then whether others used it, compared to simply having it so we could use it because we anticipated all kinds of problems ahead if we stuck to the old ways of doing such things?
AntisocialFi?
In the spirit of the above should I even provide a link, for fear the other cults might follow it?
I shudder to think of sending more mainstream, let alone startup/VC culture, types to the DMD channels for the moderators there to have to deal with, so I guess having put them at that risk I ought in fairness to take the same risk myself so here you go, a link:
https://MakeMoney.Knotwork.com/-MarkM-