Both Reddit and HN show there's an enormous value in letting anyone arrive with nearly no friction and participate. Limiting reach in the way that you suggest reduces your social network essentially to an imessage competitor.
IMO you should make a bog standard centralized social network like Twitter or whatever people are currently using. Then split your resources between the following two activities:
1. maintain a simpler, leaner, and faster interface than everyone else. Make it easier to join than everything else. And keep it that way, as much as you can. Like a craigslist UI for the 2020s.
2. put all the rest of your dollars and time into a) building an army of anti-sockpuppet/anti-abuse/anti-astroturfing techniques and b) documenting (responsibly) the existence, behavior, and elimination of said sockpuppets/astroturf campaigns. Essentially you'll be stockpiling and utilizing myriad anti-spam/anti-abuse techniques, some of which you can periodically burn to explain how you discover and remove problematic accounts at scale.
The anti-spam/anti-abuse documentation gives insight into the problems of running a social network at scale. However, it serves a more important purpose: to begin to put a floor on the types of social media manipulation that your users will tolerate. There was a day when employees would sift through email inboxes zapping spam, yet no one is willing to do that anymore. Your users will similarly become used to a much more pleasant and fulfilling social media experience. And if you do it right it puts a spin on your lower number of users and user-engagement-- i.e., you're accurately measuring your users, whereas all your competitors have an incentive to cook the books. ;)
However, this model is essentially incompatible with the current social media adtech, so you'd probably have to do a subscription model.
Also-- why not let a single paying user be able to sign up, say, ten or so friends using their subscription? Perhaps let them know that if any one gets suspended, they all get suspended. Would be interesting to see the social dynamics of that... :)
IMO you should make a bog standard centralized social network like Twitter or whatever people are currently using. Then split your resources between the following two activities:
1. maintain a simpler, leaner, and faster interface than everyone else. Make it easier to join than everything else. And keep it that way, as much as you can. Like a craigslist UI for the 2020s.
2. put all the rest of your dollars and time into a) building an army of anti-sockpuppet/anti-abuse/anti-astroturfing techniques and b) documenting (responsibly) the existence, behavior, and elimination of said sockpuppets/astroturf campaigns. Essentially you'll be stockpiling and utilizing myriad anti-spam/anti-abuse techniques, some of which you can periodically burn to explain how you discover and remove problematic accounts at scale.
The anti-spam/anti-abuse documentation gives insight into the problems of running a social network at scale. However, it serves a more important purpose: to begin to put a floor on the types of social media manipulation that your users will tolerate. There was a day when employees would sift through email inboxes zapping spam, yet no one is willing to do that anymore. Your users will similarly become used to a much more pleasant and fulfilling social media experience. And if you do it right it puts a spin on your lower number of users and user-engagement-- i.e., you're accurately measuring your users, whereas all your competitors have an incentive to cook the books. ;)
However, this model is essentially incompatible with the current social media adtech, so you'd probably have to do a subscription model.
Also-- why not let a single paying user be able to sign up, say, ten or so friends using their subscription? Perhaps let them know that if any one gets suspended, they all get suspended. Would be interesting to see the social dynamics of that... :)