The Network Effect Paradox: Why Your Social Capital Doesn’t Scale With Platform Growth
The network effect paradox reveals that as centralized platforms grow, they capture all the value while individual users become increasingly replaceable and powerless, trapped by metrics that mean nothing. Decentralized protocols like Nostr offer a fundamental inversion where network growth can actually benefit you, but only if you abandon platform behaviors and invest in building genuine relationship depth instead of chasing follower counts.