The problem with this is that paying is a massive friction point to joining that many people, wisley or not, are much more averse to than a free (if toxic) option.

Normally, this is manageable, but for product categories with a huge network effect (like social media) this is a death knell unless you have the users of that product category already used to paying (Adobe's network effect driven business model comes to mind), and even then the switching friction is greater since that usually means many people paying for two systems for quite a long time, if not indefinitely.