Fashion is one of the most interesting industries for having understood this recurring boom and bust pattern in network effects and taken ownership of its own status devaluation cycles. Some strange cabal of magazine editors and fashion designers decide each season to declare arbitrarily new styles the fashion of the moment, retiring previous... See more

Why copying proof of work is lousy strategy for status-driven networks

We often see a new social network copy a successful incumbent but with a minor twist thrown in. In the wake of Facebook’s recent issues, we may see some privacy-first social networks, but we have an endless supply of actual knockoffs to study. App.net and then Mastodon were two... See more

Recall our first tenet: humans are status-seeking monkeys. Status is a relative ladder. By definition, if everyone can achieve a certain type of status, it’s no status at all, it’s a participation trophy.

Musical.ly created a hurdle for gaining followers and status that wasn't easily cleared by many people. However, for some, especially teens, and... See more

Why does proof of work matter for a social network? If people want to maximize social capital, why not make that as easy as possible?

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... See more

If you look at the respective mission statements of Twitter and Facebook—"to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers" and “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”—what is striking is the assumption that these are fundamentally positive outcomes. There’s no... See more

I suspect the frontier of social network strategy will draw more and more upon deep study of these adjacent and much older social capital games. Fashion, video games, religion, and society itself are some of the original Status as a Service businesses.

Streaks, of course, have the wonderful quality of being unbounded. You can maintain as many streaks as you like. If you don't think social capital has value, you've never seen, as I have, a young person sobbing over having to go on vacation without their phone, or to somewhere without cell or wifi access, only to see all their streaks broken. Some... See more

Then, one day, Facebook snapped its fingers like Thanos and much of that dependable reach evaporated into ash. No longer would every one of your Page followers see every one of your posts. Facebook did what central banks do to combat inflation and raised interest rates on borrowing attention from the News Feed.

Whether you believe in the 1/9/90 rule of social networks or not,