Dalton on why slow growth is desirable,

Dalton Caldwell just posted in an insightful piece about the benefits of slow growth and building an immediately valuable service, rather than just driving for as many users as possible, as soon as possible.

He pointed to the early promise of twitter, and the quality of commentary on sites where a single user can have hundreds of thousands of followers, and how companies focused on slowly growing a quality community of users at Instagram and Quora, so it stayed a useful service for users themselves, even after the growth spike demanded by VC investment:

If we look to history, infrastructure innovations such as electricity, cellular phone service, and the Internet are judged by the longterm value that was enabled and circulated throughout their ecosystem, not the amount of value that corporations directly captured. If “social platforms” really are as fundamentally important as many of us believe, they should start behaving more like infrastructure, and less like the entertainment industry.