The problem with the subscription economy is there is no opportunity for fans to own assets, and further, subscription models don’t take into account the value that fans bring to their communities. While it’s still a nascent space, there are a few companies building in what I call “the participatory economy” — where fans participate in a creator’s success.

The Participatory economy can be understood as filling empowerment gaps and evolving our thinking from consumers as users to customers as people.

In the participatory economy, the creator is bidirectional because the customer is also a creator. The participation can happen in several ways:

1. The customer participates in the creation of the product
2. The company’s core product enables more people to participate, thereby democratizing the nodes of influence
3. The customer is aligned with the network’s upside and participates in the financial rewards

Learn more

At the time when there were only forums and personal blogs, decentralized platforms started to show up:

• collaborative wikipedia.com competing with edited encyclopedias
• habr.com where everyone could become an author after getting some reputation, moderated by community
• stackoverflow.com where moderator is elected by voting, and members getting ratings
• blog aggregators, ycombinator and reddit to bring and rate the most interesting articles by community

Those platforms help to find like minded people and build a self-organized community around it. Discussing ideas in community, brings to life awesome projects and help topics to evolve. Communication is a key. Non-decentralized many-to-many communication.

Critical Mass

• Foursquare succeeded because it focused on one city till it reached critical mass. Getting users across multiple cities would not have helped spark interactions among users leading to low engagement and eventual drop-off. Source.

References:

Critical Mass for Marketplaces: Hacking Your Way To Critical Mass | What is Critical Mass

Network Effects Aren't Enough

Critical Mass | The Complete Guide | Cleverism

Initiatives

Open source is democratizing video game development