Status Games: Engineering Scarcity in a World of Abundance

It's hard to get around that, but the way you can do it is if you build in utility. And I think that is largely because advertising was a hell of a drug for these companies for so long. That is why all these big internet advertising platforms were slow to become marketplaces, because it would have a temporary negative financial impact. Th... See more

"All parts of our economy were previously based on scarcity. In almost every case, that scarcity has disappeared. The way you win on the internet is to be the starting place where people go - Google, Facebook, these aggregators - or you're highly differentiated and you leverage the fact that you have zero distribution to reach anyone."

I think all social networks start off as a utility and blossom into social networks long term, and that’s because they earn the right to be a social network, not because they start as a social network. That’s kind of where I think we are, is this utility phase where we’re trying to be as good as possible for our beginning users and we’re going to

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But the thing is, more and more of life is structured like a game. Increasingly, corporations, institutions, governments have begun to understand how powerful this way of transforming and shaping our agency, our behavior is. And so social media is structured like a game. Our school and work lives are structured around points, ratings, grades, metri... See more

When you think about it that way — that Netflix isn’t so much a network as they are a type of marketplace in which consumers can give their attention to creators — it becomes apparent that Netflix isn’t that far off from Uber or Airbnb or any of the other market-makers that are transforming industry-after-industry. Netflix: 1.  Is an infinitel... See more

In other words, new social networks start up and there are all these people who were not influencers on any of the existing networks that get hundreds of thousands of followers just because they were first to switch. This is why every generation wants a new social network. Status becomes ossified on these big social networks. And there's const... See more