It works the same with any social media site. First the trailblazers come in, and figure out that there’s a new frontier–a place where they can be themselves, make their own rules, put up posters on the walls, do what they want.

The trailblazers are followed by the adventurers, who enjoy the relative anonymity. They stick around because they’ve found a communication channel with a relatively high signal and very little noise. They invite their friends with whom they can communicate in relative peace.

Pretty soon, having heard stories about the adventurers, along come the pioneers, the Seth Godin and Neil Patel types. They love adventure, but they’re also entrepreneurs. They see the possibilities of building a bank and a hotel. Then they advertise. They get the word out about this hot new pioneer village where you can be yourself, make your own rules, and do your banking all at once.

At this point, the trailblazers and adventurers start to move on. It’s no longer what they were initially attracted to. But that’s okay, because now we’ve got a nicely growing community. The influx of new members expands at an exponential rate, and the folks who capitalize on it are the pioneers. Others try to move in and share in the wealth, but mostly, they simply serve to enlarge the audience even more.

All of this growth attracts great numbers of people who have little investment in the original ideas, but are attracted to any place they see a huge crowd of people they can engage. By engage, I mean advertise to. At the same time, there is a huge surge of people who join the community because they’ve heard its a great place to visit, much like a theme park.

And the more it grows, the more it ripens as a platform for marketing, and the more difficult it becomes to find the stuff that the community was built on in the first place. The noise buries the signal.

In the end, the pioneers, having grown rich, insulate themselves from the larger community, stepping out in public only when they have a message to share that serves their interests in some way. The marketers generate most of the content, and the population generates most of the commentary, but without any of the incision that characterized the early settlers. Eventually the community may even turn into a neglected slum.

This may sound like fiction, but it’s not. It happened on Compuserve, it happened on Usenet, it happened on the web, and it’ll happen to Twitter. The lower the barrier to entry, the faster it happens. Social communities die from overpopulation.’

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