This is a bit of a tangent, but I've been chatting to insomniasexx a bit recently about marketing and growing Hubski, because I'm in exactly the same situation with my startup. I then stumbled across this thread (well, because I follow you, thenewgreen) and a couple of the things you said here rang really familiar, and I thought it could be helpful to chip in at a more general level.

In order to understand what makes the "community tick", you must invest some time.

It's a common situation: you've got a kick-ass product, it solves a very real problem, people who use it are head-over-heels in love with it, but there's a bit of a "dip" that requires you to take a leap of faith and use it for a bit before you get hooked. Twitter's subtle effect was that of adding an "ambient awareness layer" to the internet—a sort of dim "knowing" about what's going on in the world.

But Twitter was commonly misunderstood as being a way to "share what you had for breakfast." You had to use it for a while to really understand it. They got past this by pushing Twitter as a way to find new content from interesting people and letting people get sucked in over time.

When a friend recommends a book to you, you can't look at several pages and expect to understand and appreciate the entire book because it's the entire experience that they are recommending and in order to get the full effect you have to dive in and read the whole thing.

I love this example because it's true; yet not an immutable problem. Book services like Readmill let you shortcut this whole process. I can recommend a friend a book, but the chances of them reading it aren't huge if they can't see how it would immediately make their life better to read. It just goes into the "later" pile. But the Readmill book page contains my own personal cliffnotes: https://readmill.com/Zygar/reads/glut-mastering-informaion-t...

No real conclusions to offer here—just a few thoughts that tangentially connect with some of your examples. Hope they're helpful.