> you can't get network effects without first achieving that critical mass of users more or less on your product's own merits No one said VS Code and Discord h

> you can't get network effects without first achieving that critical mass of users more or less on your product's own merits No one said VS Code and Discord had no merits at all. Discord's core users were gamers. People who can afford to run much more demanding software for fun. People who don't care about accessibility mostly. It's free like I mentioned. It competes with Slack mostly. Slack has the same problems mostly. And 1 of Slack's merits on its way to critical mass was compatibility with other apps. VS Code's early merits were it was faster than Atom and free unlike Sublime Text. > Discord has like 200M+ MAUs, so of course "lots" of users complain about it. A large fraction in my experience. "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."[1] > I was just calling out the fact that most consumer software these days is abusive, so we have to be careful to speak about abuse in relative terms. Who said anything about abuse before you? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html