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How people behave on a social media platform turns out to be a function of whom they expect to run into – and whom they actually run into! – on that social media platform. And that turns out to be a function of how penetrant adoption is in their communities.

And a problem here is that so many assume that the behavior of users of a given social media platform is wholly attributable to the features and affordances of that social media platform!

It's very easy to mistake what are effects of being a niche or up-and- coming platform for something the platform is getting right in its design.

The example I gave about people behaving differently depending on what the likelihood is they estimate of running into certain other parties in their lives is not the only example of how scale affects how people engage with a social media platform. There are others that I know about, and probably lots I don't.

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