This is a common (not necessarily majority-) opinion on this startup website. I don’t understand why the theory asserts that the causality necessarily goes fro

This is a common (not necessarily majority-) opinion on this startup website. I don’t understand why the theory asserts that the causality necessarily goes from the user to the business. Say some social media comes along. They want users. What reason do the users have to care? Their friends are not on it. Why pay money for that? Oh, pay X amount of dollars a month and hope that in three years the network effects will have payed off? How is that rational? But FB and Twitter (etc.) did get popular! Someone responds. Aha, but that’s just survivorship bias. The above is an argument for why the regular users have little reason to accept a paid-for option when it comes to social media. But does that mean that they necessarily (indirectly) demanded a free option? No. Because if you look back twenty years, it’s not like Social Media was some kind of innate need that people had. As is usually the case, it was a manufactured need. And who could have manufactured it? It could have simply been business people with some foresight (who knew about network effects). Did the people need social media? Not any more than they needed luxury dog grooming to be a thing. But businesses always need money. And so needs are manufactured. This woe-is-businesses who have to make their money through advertising (because of the lusers’ choices) narrative is predictable (understandable) for a startup website. But the causality might not really have started with the (l)users.