Technology

The numbers are staggering. A game is incomparable. Facebook has over 3 billion users and instagram has another 2.5. Even a game like Fortnite “only” has a bit over 600 million users, and the vast majority of games see nowhere near that

You can bootstrap an audience in the millions, maybe, with a lot of luck, but getting to meta numbers takes significant capital to sustain your advertising. More importantly even with that it will still take ages. Facebook took almost a decade to get to a billion. Reddit took 18 years

Both platforms (and twitter, etc) are obviously infested with bots but what’s interesting is that from some research it appears the percentage of user accounts that are bots are far lower than many guess. I’ve seen people guess like 50+%. Per Facebook it’s more like 4-5%, and while Reddit doesn’t disclose based on content removal the numbers are similar (possibly slightly lower). This is definitely underreported though as it’s in their best interest to inflate user counts. Independent research pegs it closer to 20%. But the really interesting part is what validates the people guessing 50+%, which is user activity. Neither network comments on this but independent research pegs bots as responsible for like 50-70% of user activity.

So if you can get a network going with power users you can make it feel much more alive with possibly only 30% of the user base. But that’s where the staggering numbers come in. For Facebook that’s still 900 million people, almost 3x the entire population of america