Two years ago, my friend Eugene Wei wrote a blog post called “Status as a Service (Staas)”, which laid out what has become the canonical framework for thinking about social media. Eugene basically divides social media’s function into three dimensions — utility (i.e., direct usefulness), entertainment value, and social capital. He spends much of the post discussing the third of these — the way social networks create new ways for people to gain status and respect. Get the most Twitter follows, or the most Facebook likes, etc., and you’re somebody. Social media has democratized celebrity; anyone can be an influencer.
Anyone, but not everyone. Just as most people can’t become Hollywood stars, most people can’t become social media influencers. But unlike in the old days, when people would obsess over Hollywood actors from afar, nowadays social media allows people to come in contact with their heroes directly. And no network facilitates this more than Twitter.
I continue to believe that Twitter, alone among all social networks created thus far, represents something truly new under the sun. Facebook and LinkedIn more-or-less preserves the networks of personal friendship, hobby interest, and professional networking that exist offline. Instagram maintains the celebrity-fan dynamic, with influencers dominating their pages at an Olympian remove. But on Twitter, anyone can talk directly to anyone at any time, and, short of blocking them, the person they’re talking to can’t stop you from talking to them.
On other social networks, if you created a post, you can delete comments that you don’t like; you are the moderator of your own threads. But on Twitter you can’t. There is a “hide replies” function, but it just sends the replies to a special “hidden replies” section where anyone can peruse them at will. Even if you block someone who replies to you, their reply-tweet remains.
These two quirks of Twitter — free direct communication and no ability to regulate replies — make all the difference. Suddenly, people can talk directly to any celebrity, any politician, any journalist or activist or influencer of any kind. And the person they’re talking to can’t stop them.
Being able to reply to high-status people, whether they want you to or not, is a heady status-conferring experience. You can say mean shit to the most famous Hollywood movie star, and there’s nothing he can do about it. Or you can say something nice, and hopefully get a reply or a shout-out. This puts you on a plane of near-equality with people who otherwise tower over the social landscape.
Near-equality, but not equality!
This can be maddening. Twitter creates the instantaneous illusion of social equality between influencers and normal people.
That process, which repeats itself many millions of times every day, creates some very unusual social dynamics. For example, there’s “the ratio”, in which a mob of reply-tweeters try to leave someone with more replies than likes. It feels heady to be part of a ratio-mob, as evidenced by the people who reply with “just here for the ratio”, or who re-state a rebuttal that many others have already made. (Some people have invented a second type of “ratio” that doesn’t depend on being part of a mob: writing a reply-tweet that gets more likes than the original tweet it’s replying to. I’ve seen Zoomers in group chats bragging about the famous people they managed to “ratio” this way.)
By bringing people much closer together in social status, Twitter emphasizes the intractable gaps that remain.
As Twitter ages and the distribution of status gets even more frozen in, Twitter will have to rely on status anxiety more and more to keep new users engaged.
They’ve never taken the crucial step of allowing people to actually drop reply-tweets from their threads or untag themselves from other people’s tweets. Doing that might make Twitter a lot nicer of a place
Thus, Twitter will continue to be the place where Americans go to scream at strangers — where status is conferred not just by little snippets of viral pseudo-wisdom, but by the ability to ridicule and attack those snippets. We should probably think long and hard about whether it’s a good idea to have our public discourse dominated and directed by a platform with that basic dynamic.
12 Social Media
12.1 Twitter
Noahpinion
Dimensions
Two years ago, my friend Eugene Wei wrote a blog post called “Status as a Service (Staas)”, which laid out what has become the canonical framework for thinking about social media. Eugene basically divides social media’s function into three dimensions — utility (i.e., direct usefulness), entertainment value, and social capital. He spends much of the post discussing the third of these — the way social networks create new ways for people to gain status and respect. Get the most Twitter follows, or the most Facebook likes, etc., and you’re somebody. Social media has democratized celebrity; anyone can be an influencer.
Anyone, but not everyone. Just as most people can’t become Hollywood stars, most people can’t become social media influencers. But unlike in the old days, when people would obsess over Hollywood actors from afar, nowadays social media allows people to come in contact with their heroes directly. And no network facilitates this more than Twitter.
I continue to believe that Twitter, alone among all social networks created thus far, represents something truly new under the sun. Facebook and LinkedIn more-or-less preserves the networks of personal friendship, hobby interest, and professional networking that exist offline. Instagram maintains the celebrity-fan dynamic, with influencers dominating their pages at an Olympian remove. But on Twitter, anyone can talk directly to anyone at any time, and, short of blocking them, the person they’re talking to can’t stop you from talking to them.
On other social networks, if you created a post, you can delete comments that you don’t like; you are the moderator of your own threads. But on Twitter you can’t. There is a “hide replies” function, but it just sends the replies to a special “hidden replies” section where anyone can peruse them at will. Even if you block someone who replies to you, their reply-tweet remains.
These two quirks of Twitter — free direct communication and no ability to regulate replies — make all the difference. Suddenly, people can talk directly to any celebrity, any politician, any journalist or activist or influencer of any kind. And the person they’re talking to can’t stop them.
Being able to reply to high-status people, whether they want you to or not, is a heady status-conferring experience. You can say mean shit to the most famous Hollywood movie star, and there’s nothing he can do about it. Or you can say something nice, and hopefully get a reply or a shout-out. This puts you on a plane of near-equality with people who otherwise tower over the social landscape.
Near-equality, but not equality! This can be maddening. Twitter creates the instantaneous illusion of social equality between influencers and normal people.
That process, which repeats itself many millions of times every day, creates some very unusual social dynamics. For example, there’s “the ratio”, in which a mob of reply-tweeters try to leave someone with more replies than likes. It feels heady to be part of a ratio-mob, as evidenced by the people who reply with “just here for the ratio”, or who re-state a rebuttal that many others have already made. (Some people have invented a second type of “ratio” that doesn’t depend on being part of a mob: writing a reply-tweet that gets more likes than the original tweet it’s replying to. I’ve seen Zoomers in group chats bragging about the famous people they managed to “ratio” this way.)
By bringing people much closer together in social status, Twitter emphasizes the intractable gaps that remain.
As Twitter ages and the distribution of status gets even more frozen in, Twitter will have to rely on status anxiety more and more to keep new users engaged. They’ve never taken the crucial step of allowing people to actually drop reply-tweets from their threads or untag themselves from other people’s tweets. Doing that might make Twitter a lot nicer of a place
Thus, Twitter will continue to be the place where Americans go to scream at strangers — where status is conferred not just by little snippets of viral pseudo-wisdom, but by the ability to ridicule and attack those snippets. We should probably think long and hard about whether it’s a good idea to have our public discourse dominated and directed by a platform with that basic dynamic.
Noahpinion (2021) Status Anxiety as Service