For the desktop experience, or listening to music, that logic works well. But the network effect (winning the "popularity contest") is crucial for services that

For the desktop experience, or listening to music, that logic works well. But the network effect (winning the "popularity contest") is crucial for services that are much more network-dependent, i.e. what's being described in the article, or even hackernews (if there were only 100 people on this site we'd have much lower quality links/discussions)