As more people in crypto explore social, I find myself often talking about what makes social networks work and, sometimes, not work. One key conversation is around status. Here are some lessons I learned from my web2 days.
Social networks tend to elevate content that it expects will get attention. Doing so incentivizes a particular type of behavior that lends status to the users performing said behavior. Typically, there’s a status indicator that people have to try and accumulate. It comes in various forms – karma, follower/like counts, XP, the verified badge, leaderboards, etc.
Naive implementations of the above often result in a fatal flaw – concentrating status in a few “status rich” users leaving the vast “status poor” and ensuring newcomers have a bad experience. While doing so might be value maximizing in the short run, in the long run it’s a bad strategy as new users can’t break in and eventually overall network quality decays.
First, how do you model status in a network? The Gini coefficient is typically a measure of wealth inequality: the more the inequality, the higher the number. For social networks, we can use this as a measure of relative status distribution and use your network’s indicator of status (followers/karma/etc.) as wealth.
In other words: do a small set of your users have outsized status?
This brings me to some personal beliefs on social network design and how social network builders should think of themselves more as modeling economic policy.
Most social networks tend to bend towards high status inequality (a high Gini coefficient) by default.
If your social network has high inequality you are going to struggle to retain newcomers.
Having high status mobility is key to any vibrant social network, even when your goal is not to grow your overall user base.