In new ecosystems everyone asks questions like "what's the incentive for the new creators?"

This is often a good question, but not always.

For example, imagine a dynamic where a savvy user's actions in the system to solve their own problems also indirectly create value for other users.

For example, there's a brand new pop star, and a search engine doesn't yet know that their name is something that people will want to see pictures of.

But a savvy user, on unexpectedly seeing no images for their query for that popstar's name, can prepend "images of" to their query to return images.

Now the search engine could notice the elevated proportion of "images of X" queries for that X, and start showing images for just the query "X" too.

Everyone benefits from the small, in-context actions of a savvy user just trying to solve their own problem.

In these examples, the question of "what's the incentive of the savvy user to create" is meaningless; they're creating to solve a problem for themselves, and those creations just so happen to help others.

Ecosystems with this dynamic can bootstrap significantly faster than ecosystems without it.