The death spiral is:
1. Show friends content to attract users
2. Realize that friends don't product enough content to increase engagement.
3. Start introducing suggested content to increase engagement
4. Friend stop producing content since their content is deprioritized and not getting engagement
5. Now your feed is full of suggested content and isn't interesting any more
6. You leave and find another platform
Good article on that point: https://rosie.land/posts/stop-measuring-community-engagement...
MLMs make billions, but they are still MLMs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law