I wonder if you see the implicit racism in your first sentence.
Also: the issue for any network is that your 5k people will likely differ significantly from my 5k (or whatever the right number is). Extend that over an entire user population and now Metcalfe's Law takes hold, but in reverse.
It is a studied fact that both myspace and twitter have been more adopted by the popular music scene (hip hop, pop, rock) than other technologies, and that both have much higher percentages of black users than other similar sites on the Internet (and in the military, it was mainly enlisted using myspace, and officers using facebook; guess which one they blocked after 3 months?) This article, for example: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2010/08/...
"Urban" seems like a pretty fair term for teenaged/young adult hip-hop and related culture people, which does include more black people than the general population. However, a black 40 year old college cs professor or engineering professional is more likely to be on facebook (or linkedin, or researchgate, or hn) than twitter, so it's not really a racial thing, it's cultural, which is probably more tied to age and interests than anything else.
"Urban" is a euphemism for "black." See also "inner-city" & in reference to young people often "at-risk." Not saying commenter intended to be racist but that the term "urban" refers to black people (in the US, in this context) is indisputable.
I live in the inner city. I'm white. My apartment is in an urban area, meaning I'm surrounded more by buildings than well-manicured streets and houses. I live in an urban environment. And we have people of all shapes, sizes and colors here.
When I lived in L.A. (North Hollywood, specifically), it was the same thing - urban (meaning, "of or pertaining to a city," look it up), but much more run-down. Not a lot of black people. More hispanics and white people. Myself included.
Communication depends on a common language to make it work. Just because you've decided that a common word means something different than its etymology - or its definition, even - doesn't make it so.
You're both incorrect and needlessly condescending, so I'll correct you with your own uncivil tone.
I'm not sure if you're being willfully obtuse or you actually have been living under a rock all your life and thus never heard the ubiquitous use of "urban" as code for "minority," but suffice it to say, the person you're responding to probably did not single-handedly plant all of the references to the phenomenon that exist in the world. Look it up: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=urban
The fact that you can neither grasp the concept of a connotation nor fathom the idea of a word being used euphemistically does not make its real-world usage go away.
And what do you think is racist about "ghetto"? Who is it racist against? Knee-jerk political correctness is the lowest form of intellectual activity, barely one step above brain death.
I think he meant "urban" was racist. It does correlate with race, but I don't think the term (as used in marketing demographics) is racist as I used it -- purely descriptive of the userbase of a site. Similarly I'd say most BET viewers and fans of Talib Kweli are black AND urban, but that statement isn't racist IMO (although I'm not even sure if it is true; I like Talib Kweli and it is possible that even if a greater percentage of black vs. non black people are fans, the total number of non black fans is higher due to a greater total non black population.) I think it is reasonable to have a discussion of something where race, culture, age, geographic factors, etc might exist without it being racist in the commonly accepted sense.
Also: the issue for any network is that your 5k people will likely differ significantly from my 5k (or whatever the right number is). Extend that over an entire user population and now Metcalfe's Law takes hold, but in reverse.