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a16z: Learning from Web2 social networks, why is status equality so important?

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The biggest mistake you can make is not acknowledging that at the heart of social networking is "social capital."

Original Title: "A16z | Status Trap: Learning from Web2 Social Networks"

Original Author: Sriram Krishnan

Original Compilation: Block unicorn

As more and more people explore social in the cryptocurrency space, I find myself often talking about what makes a social network work , and sometimes it doesn't even work. A key conversation is around state, and here are some of the experiences and lessons I've learned from the web2 days.

Social networks tend to promote content that is expected to gain attention. Doing so incentivizes a specific type of behavior, providing status to the user performing that behavior. Generally, there is a status indicator that one has to strive to accumulate. It comes in various forms - likes, follower/like counts, experience points, certification badges, leaderboards, etc.

Simple implementations of the above methods often lead to a fatal flaw - centralizing state in For a small number of users with "rich status", most of the users with "poor status" leave, resulting in a poor experience for new users. While doing this maximizes value in the short term, it is a poor strategy in the long run as new users are locked out and overall network quality eventually degrades.

First of all, how do you model status in a network? The Gini coefficient is usually a measure of wealth inequality: the higher the number, the higher the inequality. For social networks, we can use this as a measure of relative status distribution, and your network's status metrics (followers/Karma/etc) as wealth.

In other words: Does a small percentage of your users have huge status?

This got me thinking about some personal views on social network design, and how social network builders should think of themselves more as models for economic policy.

1. Most social networks are by default skewed toward high status inequality (high Gini coefficient).

2. If your social network has high inequality, you will Difficult to retain newcomers.

3. Having high status mobility is the key to any vibrant social network , even if your goal is not to grow your overall user base.

What new problems will high inequality bring?

The simplest understanding is status = capital. You want capital to flow around looking for healthy behaviors, not locked up, or in conflict with healthy behaviors. Why?

1. Newuser imitating unhealthy behavior: Your highest status user has Know how to play the status game - they know how to get millions of followers/answer the most questions/take actions that give them status. However, you probably don't want your new users to model this behavior, and imitation in social networks will naturally work against you.

Let's take the current twitter as an example: you may have noticed that a lot of tweets these days are just threads (how many times have you seen "a twitter thread 1 /37...?) While this might be how someone gets their millionth follower, it's definitely not something you want your new users to try to do.

2. People don't want to play a game they can't win: When a new user appears in a social network, once Once they understand the basic mechanics, they accumulate some initial state: their first follower, their first performance, their first points. Then they check the global leaderboard, or look at their favorite How many followers a celebrity has, or worse, how many karma lists their peers have. If they see a person with countless karma lists and they have no way to approach him, they get discouraged and move on to something else that is easier approach.

Social networks have a sharp version when you have to produce content - nobody wants to post a video/text/photo, And it didn't get any response compared to normal.

It's human nature to discover how to play games/win status games, if your users think your Social networking is too hard to play, or has already been won by some people, and they move on to other games.

3 .Status NIMBYism: When you have a high status group, they usually try to prevent newcomers from gaining status.

You often see this when current users who are familiar with a network "meta" and don't like the change protest. You often get high-status groups that work together, and if there's no high-status mobility, they shut out new people.

The list goes on and on, as do the September 1993 changes. Remember when Instagram users protested the app’s release on Android? Or more recently, when Instagram shifted its focus from photos to short videos. These will continue to happen as the means of collecting status change.

How can we reduce the concentration of status and encourage the flow of status?

1. "Universal Base Status": A common mechanism is to grant newcomers a temporary status boost, often through algorithmic leverage that controls distribution and rewards.

If you sign up for a new account on any of the popular social platforms, you might notice this. Your content will get more recommendations, you'll get more boosts in friend recommendations, and that effect will wane over time.

There are various ways to build these mechanisms into the network.

Temporary Boosted State: Assign a temporary boosted state at critical times - eg: when someone new joins a network / when they come back after being away for a while / execute a Key desired action.

This boost is usually algorithmically, giving the content more chances to be seen, or getting new people to interact with it ("X just joined, hit a call!"). In each case, you're "improving" someone new's chances of having a positive experience (and incurring a cost, since this improvement has to be at someone else's expense).

"Fair" distribution status: Through some "fair" algorithm, the status signal is distributed to users in the network. For example, build an algorithm that uses humans to decide who should appear on any recommendation page. This is one of the reasons for using a reverse feed—everyone has a fair chance to have their content seen.

Note: Status must have an inherent notion of scarcity to make sense. If you're distributing status, you're creating inflation and possibly accidentally devaluing your status signal, and you can't "copy " new status without side effects.

2. Make Status Obscure: Another mitigation is to downplay all status indicators that get people to look for it. By blurring status, you are able to give yourself more options and allow players to focus on real game/app mechanics rather than status mechanics.

You can see examples of this in recent years. Instagram tries to hide the number of people who like a post, TikTok downplays the number of followers. All of these ambiguous state changes help to mitigate this effect, as well as other reasons for their existence. The downside of this approach is that if your social network is about status, without indicators, people might not know what "game" they are playing.

3. Set up groups of people with similar status levels: If you've played any mainstream competitive game, you'll be familiar with the " The concept of "ranked" games (often ELO ratings) where the game tries to group you with others of a similar skill level, so you're more likely to have a challenging but not impossible experience. Similarly, dating apps often attempt to use ELO (ranking point)-style mechanisms to classify people into those with similar "attractiveness".

One way for social networks to create a great new user experience is to provide a "ranking" experience where they have access to the entire graph subset or interact with it. For example, a sub-Reddit, not everyone competes on Reddit.

4. Reset or Decay Status Indicators: A drastic measure against status centralization is to let each status indicator decay over time - which is a deflationary measure of status indicators.

For example, karma decays the longer you stay off the net, or lose focus over time followers (especially if you gained a large following due to being on the early suggested user list).

As far as I know, no one has actually tried this logically extreme version: regular It might be an interesting experiment to set all state indicators to zero and reset the network from scratch.

5. Reset "Meta" : One reason Instagram and Youtube's shift to short videos has been controversial is that they " Reset Meta" - this is a concept familiar to gamers everywhere. Doing this, combined with one of the mechanisms above, shakes up liquidity and changes who gets status in your network.

Accidentally causing status problems

Social networks often accidentally Encounter difficult state problems.

Accidental status hyperinflation: status is closely related to scarcity and/or more "proof of work". A common way to detonate your social network is to take a heretofore scarce or hard-to-obtain status signal and let it spread widely overnight, without regard to downstream effects. In many of these cases, you've either destroyed the network, or made people aware of the state in other ways than you had anticipated.

What does this have to do with high inequality? All too often you see the web trying to do this to fight inequality (reluctantly speaking up online and getting huge instant attention), only to create an even worse problem by devaluing a key reward mechanism. To quote a line from Superman: "If everyone is a superhero, then no one is a superhero".

Accidental indicators of high status: A related problem is that in In some cases, status indicators are accidentally introduced and create inequalities.

My favorite example is the "verified" badge on a social network. While originally meant "this person is actually who they claim to be Person X", a measure designed to combat impostors, all networks may initially require "famous person" (read: to some extent famous) promotion. oops! As a result, leading to him being widely understood as "this guy is famous in the world," something every network has struggled to achieve to this day.

Exacerbating status inequality: A common pitfall of naive enforcement of discovery, ranking, or status is unintentionally discouraging newcomers "Join ".

Any social experience has attention or presentation mechanisms that need to take relative status into account. A naive "suggestion" feed or "top users" might be to rank content based on follower count - ensuring that people with large followings get more views, while new users on the platform never feel discovered. More often than not, such naive realizations exacerbate inequality and make it impossible for newcomers to climb the status ladder.

Often, such naive realizations exacerbate inequality and make it impossible for newcomers to climb up the ladder of status.

As Eugene Wei astutely points out, the biggest mistake you can make is not acknowledging that at the heart of social networking is "social capital". Understanding how capital is created, traded and spent will determine the success or failure of your network. Doing this may mean your role is more of a policymaker/economist than a traditional product maker/engineer.