fitness and virality
In general, restricting your audience enables you to design more effectively around your users' tastes and needs. Resulting structures are more fitting. The downside is that their speed of adoption is slower due to the lower virality coefficients associated with dispersed audiences.
Prone to critical thresholds, growth of social structures like marketplaces and social media platforms are very sensitive to speed of adoption. This is the primary reason why social verticals repeatedly fail to take off while non-social verticals easily succeed. Those that take off are usually subgraphs of already existing general graphs and therefore suffer from serious design defects.
This discussion is related to another blog post where I viewed abstraction as a lever between probability of longevity and probability of success.
In the practical realm, general and useful structures are easier to find but also easier to kill. (They eventually get dismantled by verticals which can more efficiently solve each of the collectively-addressed problems.) In the theoretical realm, abstract and useful results are harder to kill but also harder to find.
In the practical realm general structures emerge first and verticals come later. In the theoretical realm specific results emerge first and abstractions come later.
These dichotomies stem from the difference between serving and understanding. Former gets better as you zoom in, latter gets better as you zoom out.
