Status as a Service (StaaS) — Remains of the Day

Until we have metrics that distinguish between healthy and unhealthy activity, social network execs largely have to steer by anecdote, by licking a finger and sticking it in the air to ascertain the direction of the wind. Some may find it hard to believe when execs plead ignorance when alerted of the scope of problems on their services, but I don't

Young people look at so many of the status games of older folks—what brand of car is parked in your garage, what neighborhood can you afford to live in, how many levels below CEO are you in your org—and then look at apps like Vine and Musical.ly, and they choose the only real viable and thus optimal path before them. Remember the second tenet: peop

This isn’t to say that proof of work is bad. In fact, coming up with a constraint that unlocks the creativity of so many people is exactly how Status as a Service businesses achieve product-market fit. Constraints force the type of compression that often begets artistic elegance, and forcing creatives to grapple with a constraint can foster the typ

From a user perspective, people are starting to talk more and more about the soul-withering effects of playing an always-on status game through the social apps on their always connected phones. You could easily replace Status as a Service with FOMO as a Service. It’s one reason you can still meet so many outrageously wealthy people in Manhattan or

One of the fundamental lessons of successful social networks is that they must first appeal to people when they have few users. Typically this is done through some form of single-user utility.

This is the classic cold start problem of social. The answer to the traditional chicken-and-egg question is actually answerable: what comes first is a single

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. If we think of these networks as marketplaces trading only in information, and not in status, then we're only seeing part of the machine. The menacing phone call has been

Most of these near clones have and will fail. The reason that matching the basic proof of work hurdle of an Status as a Service incumbent fails is that it generally duplicates the status game that already exists. 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 compellin

One hypothesis on why social networks tend to lose heat at scale is that this type of old money can't be cleared out, and new money loses the incentive to play the game.

But perhaps even more confounding is that executives at successful social networks are some of the highest status people in the world. Forget first world problems, they have .1% or .001% problems. On a day-to-day basis, they hardly face a single issue that their core users grapple with constantly. Engagement goals may drive them towards building se