He has a point: if your new social thing just recreates the same status hierarchy, it won’t work. Instead, by asking people to make a new kind of content (talk audio, or TikTok dances, etc), you rearrange the status hierarchy so a new class of creators can succeed

The thousand true fans thesis builds on the original ideals of the internet: users and creators globally connected, unconstrained by intermediaries, sharing ideas and economic upside. Incumbent social media platforms sidetracked this vision by locking creators into a bundle of distribution and monetization. There are, correspondingly, two ways to... See more

One comes in the form of NewNew, a start-up in Los Angeles, that describes its product as creating a “human stock market.” On the app, fans pay to vote in polls to control some of a creator’s day-to-day decisions.