[HN Gopher] Status Traps: Learning from Web2 Social Networks
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Status Traps: Learning from Web2 Social Networks
Author : miletus
Score : 23 points
Date : 2022-08-14 17:49 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (a16zcrypto.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (a16zcrypto.com)
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| Just seeing the domain on this leaves me so conflicted. A16z
| content is excellent but I have a strong distaste for crypto (and
| those who peddle it).
| notpushkin wrote:
| Then you'd probably be glad to hear that this particular
| article has little to do with crypto.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Did we read the same article? They literally mention crypto
| in the first sentence and then approach social networking as
| if there's a status token that needs to be distributed to
| have a working social network. No one talks like this outside
| of the crypto community.
| ketzo wrote:
| > as if there's a status token that needs to be distributed
| to have a working social network
|
| I mean... empirical evidence would suggest that this is
| true, no?
|
| Has there ever been a popular social media/network that
| _didn't_ have a very direct form of status token?
| majormajor wrote:
| > Social networks tend to elevate content that it expects
| will get attention. Doing so incentivizes a particular
| type of behavior that lends status to the users
| performing said behavior. Typically, there's a status
| indicator that people have to try and accumulate. It
| comes in various forms - karma, follower/like counts, XP,
| the verified badge, leaderboards, etc.
|
| Early forums and then social networks were massively
| popular before getting algorithmic feeds or basically any
| of this stuff. Nobody was getting rich or famous off
| their post count.
|
| Honestly, the biggest failure of imagination here is
| assuming that what's really going to succeed here is a
| modified (with "UBI" or whatever ideas) form of the
| status quo. TikTok, for instance, has a wildly different
| interaction model than FB/Twitter-era networks completely
| outside of any conception of "modeling statu" in it.
| demetrius wrote:
| Yeah, I was really surprised at the idea to equate the
| number of followers with wealth, and calculate inequality
| of this wealth distribution
|
| Like... Followers are people with their own agency! Even if
| they tend to read someone more often then the others, you
| can't treat this in same way as the wealth distribution
| satyrnein wrote:
| Libertarians would argue that wealth inequality is the
| natural outcome of consumers exercising their agency. I
| recall one asking why progressives are obsessed with
| income equality but not trying to address inequality in
| number of sex partners.
| EGreg wrote:
| Really sad that crypto has such a bad reputation in HN. As
| hackers we're supposed to be challenging the entrenched Big
| Tech monopoly with its silos, but every time someone like IPFS
| or BitTorrent or MaidSAFE releases a token it's somehow
| considered worse than the extremely centralized "cloud
| offerings" or privately owned networks. It's crazy.
|
| You say "a16z content is excellent" but a16z is the largest VC
| firm, with the VC industry funding closed source proprietary
| companies that extract rents and capture the market. People
| like Peter Thiel who say "competition is for losers, build a
| monopoly" and make sure Mark Z never builds wirehog, a peer to
| peer file sharing network, because that wouldn't extract enough
| rents. People like Adam Neumann who build money-losing
| companies and dump the shares on the public, how are they any
| better than say the folks behind MaidSAFE who have been toiling
| since 2006 to bring everyone a FREE and open source secure file
| sharing network?
|
| Crypto is cryptography powering open, byzantine fault tolerant
| protocols. It is the future. People governing things together
| (currently called DAOs). Code you can trust. And so on.
|
| What sucks is blockchain, not crypto.
| b1ue64 wrote:
| Crypto depends on blockchain. You clearly don't know much
| about the technology you're peddling.
| logisticseh wrote:
| The characterization of crypto stuff as an alternative to Big
| Tech is, frankly, one of the most bewildering "Emperor Has No
| Clothes" situations I've seen in my life. And I've seen a few
| tech hype cycles.
| EGreg wrote:
| What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are?
| With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to
| be online regardless of any third party, and so on?
|
| For example, everything I've built and given away over the
| last 10 years has been building towards an alternative to
| Big Tech: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Even as someone who believes in the blockchain, its a little
| rich to pose it as a counter to Big Tech.
|
| Its already being centralized and co-opted by the big guys.
| EGreg wrote:
| Yes, as I said, blockchain sucks. It requires large nodes
| to run the gateways and people just use those gateways. And
| so the Big Boys (TM) can come and run those. For example
| OpenSea may as well be a centralized site with an API for
| everyone, since all the wallets hit that API anyway. Is
| that what you want? Are you just throwing your hands up in
| the air and saying we can never get away from extreme
| centralization, or are you saying we SHOULD have the
| extreme centralization?
|
| But the idea of crypto isn't just to work on a blockchain.
| It's about having public-private keys that you use to issue
| transactions on a decentralized, permissionless network.
| For example the Dat protocol / hypercore. What about all
| the other architectures? Is BitTorrent being centralized
| and co-opted, for instance? Is IOTA tangle or MaidSAFE or
| any of the other architectures?
| jrmg wrote:
| 'Byzantine' is good now?
| EGreg wrote:
| Yes, Byzantine Fault Tolerance is very good.
| exogeny wrote:
| a16z in particular are on the leading edge of the get-equity-
| in-tokens-with-no-lockup and then immediately pump & dump scam.
|
| Step 1: Find literally any crypto project. Doesn't matter.
|
| Step 2: "Invest in it", and immediately receive tokens with no
| lockup.
|
| Step 3: Have Chris Dixon write a breathless tweet about it,
| call your friends and get press coverage. Get a16z-adjacent
| influencers involved.
|
| Step 4: Price goes up because a16z is leading; immediately
| dump.
|
| Step 5: Project rugs.
|
| Yay, crypto. It's the best.
|
| It's interesting because most of these projects are absolute
| dogshit and will go to zero, but since they've already exited,
| they'll show nice returns to their LPs. But to the average
| person following it, all they'll see is a16z backing a string
| of rugs and embarrassing failures; I guess the PR hit is worth
| it, until Marc starts talking NIMBY shit again.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| I like that HN doesn't emblazon the user's points/status so
| clearly compared to something like FB/Twitter, where "likes" is
| front and center.
|
| I also like that the quality of the post is reflected in the # of
| votes in the UI (by graying the post out if it's not good). I
| wonder if it's useful to add some indicator that a post was
| "highly voted", or would that create more "status accrual"
| behavior?
|
| I think Reddit is completely designed around status accrual with
| the badges and votes plastered all over each post -- that's
| probably taking it too far.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Another mitigation technique the article missed:
|
| Instead of resetting everyone's status to zero, you can create
| a new status game. E.g. if you've implemented "likes" to your
| posts, you can add a "voted most helpful" status and highlight
| "these are the ones voted most helpful". Adding another status
| game side steps original status game.
|
| It could also be interesting to have "status mini games" where
| different statuses switch out over time, but this probably
| works better for small communities rather than massive social
| media sites like Twitter.
| colinsane wrote:
| "status" occurs 63 times in this 1900 word article. "game" occurs
| 12 times, "capital" 4 times. may as well call these things
| "status games". whatever a16z is cooking up this time, there's no
| way in hell it will resemble or is even designed to resemble
| anything the ordinary human would encounter (or desire) in their
| day-to-day social life.
|
| hell, they bring up the gini coefficient not once but _twice_.
| how the _fuck_ is this relevant to a person 's social life? if
| you're looking for a way to balance a social network, look no
| further than Dunbar's number: actual _social_ networks are
| naturally somewhat egalitarian (moreso than the stuff a16z is
| discussing at least) -- as soon as you stop thinking of them in
| terms of some hierarchy meant to be gamed.
| [deleted]
| trombone5000 wrote:
| Perhaps the game can be turned around by arranging it in a way
| that you lose if you're too good at it.
|
| Rank and yank from the top - periodically remove the top X% of
| users by score, and delete all of their contributions.
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