Communities that grow slowly tend to be more resilient and durable.

Communities that grow in a flash attract a lot of low-engagement / low-savviness members.

For example, people who find the tool via a TechCrunch post.

Or people who want to get in on the ground-floor of a new crypto token.

Now your community is full of low-engagement / low-savinness users.

If you ask what your users want, you will get low-quality suggestions that dumb down the product.

You'll chase your worst users into the worst version of your product.

You'll get the Tyranny of the Marginal User effect, turbocharged.

Some communities are actively difficult to join in on.

Joining in requires going through a gauntlet: crawling through some amount of broken glass.

Maybe the product is very rough around the edges of hard to use.

This is a naturally-occurring gauntlet for the first release of products!

Or maybe the documentation is illegible, and takes some work to unpack.

If you ask these high-quality users what they want, they will give you interesting dimensions to develop on.

If the early adopters have to go through a gauntlet, the less-engaged bounce, and only the most-engaged remain.

Sometimes the gauntlet is too intense, and a critical mass of people never make it through.