There's a chicken and egg issue with the rise of a social media.

You can't get people to join if there isn't a lot of people, and there isn't a lot of people because nobody joins.

Faking the participants 'till you make it is cheating, compared to an organic growth that rarely happens at the inception of a new platform.

I don’t agree with this. There is only a chicken and egg issue if the people joining are the product. You can’t sell product data if it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of product to be sold. If social networks required paid membership, small amount of total users wouldn’t be a bug it’d be a feature.

I personally don't see a social media platform that would succeed through a mandatory paid membership. The main interest in social media to the majority of user is the reach and read a large amount of users, and keeping it small and exclusive might not be an attractive feature to a majority.

I agree and disagree. One hand it’s free to signup and post whatever to my personal account and like a few pages. However the “reach” argument breaks down when the social media company starts filtering what a I do and don’t see. If I decide I want public reach too then I have to buy an ad space from the social media company for that reach. So if that’s true then the reach you get is a lie and you have to pay for membership anyways.

We wish.

The amount they are doing about bots, trolls, and outright state-funded dezinformatsiya and active measures warfare being waged on their platforms is only the absolute minimum so that they can claim to be "doing something", and not appear to be fully and actively allied with the assaults on democracy.