Source: 8Ball
While media and industry commentators cycle through breathless coverage of emerging platforms and social technologies, ordinary consumers remain stubbornly unmoved—a gap that's widening rather than closing. This creates a structural problem for startups and platforms betting on viral adoption: reaching critical mass requires either genuine utility that transcends hype or regulatory and network-effect forcing functions, neither of which ChatGPT, Web3, or recent social apps have reliably demonstrated. Consumers have learned to sit out hype cycles, making the old playbook of "build it and they'll come" far more expensive and uncertain.