As an aside though, only 10% participating isn't very unique to youtube. Its a pretty common rule of thumb that 89% only lurk, 10% participate in some limited fashion, and 1% become super active, in any online community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
But I agree in general that a problem may be sort of recursive or self-supporting and not always technical. I just see people often enumerating simplest solutions and defeating them in the same comment, so that nothing gets done or even tried, when real-world systems are always complex and complexity is hard but at the same time has many potential tipping points. People build empires on default settings alone and lose businesses on a tiny but stable leak in the funnel. Thinking that there’s no such important and easily overlooked points in any non-trivial system, and it’s just all about users, is a mistake.
An example that probably everyone can understand is youtube. Content creators are often begging for like/subscribe and even present graphs that show that only 10% of their regular viewers are subscribed. This seems like a social problem to some, but in reality it’s a technical problem because if you like/subscribe, your feed will drown in “similar” videos of much lower quality and that will haunt you for weeks. And there’s a whole set of other ui/ux issues even if you decide to subscribe. So many people avoid interacting with videos too much because of that.
I know youtube is a beaten horse, but it is a textbook example of what I mean. I could theorize about what’s wrong with wikis, but wiki guys see it much better. My key thought here is “check twice that it’s not technical before calling it social”, but it may not be the case here.