Status Games: Engineering Scarcity in a World of Abundance

In our conversation, Nadia mentioned the classic piece “Status as a service” by Eugene Wei that details how Twitter functions (or functioned) as a giant status-seeking engine. This piece, Nadia proposed, crystalized the era of the internet when people were optimizing for likes and cultural cache in a game that felt novel and exciting. Something ess... See more

If we accept that scarcity drives status if correctly applied, and that humans will change their behavior and open their wallets to attain status, creating it reliably and repeatedly should be valuable.

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

In a world of abundance, scarcity evolves. While pre-internet scarcity was about a physically constrained, or otherwise limited, number of resources, post-internet scarcity is about separating signal from noise.