People are status-seeking monkeys

People seek out the most efficient path to maximizing social capital

most of the social media networks we study generate much more social capital than actual financial capital, especially in their early stages

The harder version of the question is why the first chicken came and stayed when no other chickens were around, and why the others followed.

wrote Chris Dixon, in perhaps the most memorable maxim for how this works.

What ties many of these explanations together is social capital theory, and how we analyze social networks should include a study of a social network's accumulation of social capital assets and the nature and structure of its status games.

The other axis is, for a lack of a more precise term, the social capital axis, or the status axis. Can I use the social network to accumulate social capital? What forms? How is it measured? And how do I earn that status?

those which compete on the social capital axis are often more mysterious than pure utilities.

there was a thought that new social networks would be built on some new modality of communications. That's a piece of it, but it's not the complete picture

status games of adults are already well covered by the existing media, from literature to film.

Almost every social network of note had an early signature proof of work hurdle.

Successful social networks don't pose trick questions at the start, it’s usually clear what they want from you.

The difference is, they bring a massive supply of exogenous pre-existing social capital from another status game, the fame game, to every table, and some forms of social capital transfer quite well across platforms.

More specific forms of fame or talent might not retain their value as easily:

It's true that as more people join a network, more social capital is up for grabs in the aggregate. However, in general, if you come to a social network later, unless you bring incredible exogenous social capital (Taylor Swift can join any social network on the planet and collect a massive following immediately), the competition for attention is going to be more intense than it was in the beginning.

As with cryptocurrency, if it were so easy, it wouldn't be worth anything. Value is tied to scarcity, and scarcity on social networks derives from proof of work. Status isn't worth much if there's no skill and effort required to mine it.

By definition, if everyone can achieve a certain type of status, it’s no status at all, it’s a participation trophy.

To succeed at carving out unique space in the market, social networks offer their own unique form of status token, earned through some distinctive proof of work.

The star is the filter, not the user, and so it didn't really make sense to follow any one person over any other person.

It was a utility that failed at becoming a Status as a Service business.

a new Status as a Service business must devise some proof of work that depends on some actual skill to differentiate among users.

The second tenet is that people seek out the most efficient path to maximize their social capital.

heavy social media users are hyper aware of differing status ROI among the apps they use.

Some features can increase the reach of content on any network. A reshare option like the retweet button is a massive accelerant of virality on apps where the social graph determines what makes it into the feed.

a social network should continue to prioritize distribution for the best content, whatever the definition of quality, regardless of the vintage of user producing it.

Distribution is king, even when, or especially when it allocates social capital.

By definition, if the proof of work is the same, you're not really creating a new status ladder game, and so there isn't a real compelling reason to switch when the new network really has no one in it.

If you can't change the proof of work competition as a challenger, copy and throttle is an effective strategy for the incumbent.

The problem with copying Snapchat is that, well, the reason young people left Facebook for Snapchat was in large part because their parents had invaded Facebook.

You can take the monkey out of the status-seeking game, but you can't take the status-seeking out of the monkey.

As humans, we intuitively understand that some galling percentage of our happiness with our own status is relative. What matters is less our absolute status than how are we doing compared to those around us.

Some businesses work best at scale, and if you believe that people want to accumulate social capital as efficiently as possible, putting a bound on how much they can earn is a challenging business model, as dark as that may be.

While we're all status-seeking monkeys, young people tend to be the tip of the spear when it comes to catapulting new Status as a Service businesses, and may always will be.

Young people are generally social capital poor unless they've lucked into a fat inheritance.

the fastest and most efficient path to gaining social capital, while they wait to level up enough to win at more grown-up games like office politics, is to ply their trade on social media

First utility, then social capital

This is the well-known “come for the tool, stay for the network”

Whether you believe in the 1/9/90 rule of social networks or not, it’s directionally true that any network has value to people besides its creators. In fact, for almost every network, the number of lurkers far exceeds the number of active participants. Life may not be a spectator sport, but a lot of social media is.

If you want to know why Musical.ly stopped growing and sold to Bytedance, why Douyin will hit a ceiling of users in China (if it hasn’t already), or what the cap of active users is for any social network, first ask yourself how many people have the skill and interest to compete in that arena.

You'll hear it again and again, the easiest way to empathize with your users is to be the canonical user yourself.

what is striking is the assumption that these are fundamentally positive outcomes.

But the solution also doesn’t lie in ignoring that humans are wired to pursue social capital. In fact, overlooking this fundamental aspect of human nature arguably landed us here, at the end of this first age of social network goliaths, wondering where it all went haywire.