To understand how social networks have taken the world by storm, we must start with StaaS and social capital.

Considering the difficulty of understanding, the translator replaced some cases with versions suitable for Chinese Internet users. The full text is more than 10,000 words long. Enjoy 🙂

Humans are Status-Seeking Monkeys

Let's start with two basic principles:

• Humans are status-seeking monkeys
• People seek the most effective ways to acquire social capital

These are two most basic observations of human nature, and almost no one would dispute them. However, all current analyses of social products do not focus much on people's status and social capital.

The main reason for this result is that social capital cannot be accurately measured. Numbers provide accuracy and credibility, so we use them to calculate and measure financial capital (money or assets, the same below) and its flow. Most financial websites and analysis agencies also very accurately count and analyze the price and changes of currencies.

But we still lack similar methods to measure the value and flow of social capital. There are too few existing research institutions, and the research conclusions are not in-depth enough. If we can use better measurement criteria other than user volume (such as DAU, MAU), perhaps we can rank and analyze all social product accounts on the market. The annual report obtained in this way may have the same influence as the Internet trend report released by Internet Queen Mary Meeker every year.

Since it cannot be proved accurately, how can we prove that it does exist?

We can find that the social capital that most social products can give to users far exceeds the actual financial capital, especially in the early stages. Whether it is domestic Internet companies or Silicon Valley startups, the rule that everyone firmly believes in in the early days is: don't make money first, increase the number of users, and build social relationships is the focus. Moreover, although we cannot actually quantify social capital, as social creatures, we can always feel it.

The existence of social capital can help us understand human social behavior on the Internet.

For a long time, Software as a Service (SaaS) has been very popular. If we regard social networks as a kind of software, the status (Status) used to carry the social capital of users on it is also a service, which is what we want to explore in depth next, Status as a Service (StaaS).

Traditional Network Effects Model of Social Networks

One of the lessons of successful social networks is that they have to first attract people to use them when there are few users. Usually, the product itself can satisfy a basic utility.

Building a social network requires a cold start process. The chicken-and-egg problem is relatively easy to solve: first you have some chickens, then they lay eggs, hatch other chickens, and so on. But the more difficult question is why the first batch of chickens came here when there were no other chickens, and why other chickens would choose to follow.

That’s why A16Z partner Chris Dickson gave an empirical solution: Come for the Tool, Stay for the Network.

That’s why, social networks follow Metcalfe’s Law: the value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of users.

This is why the growth curve of social networks suddenly explodes at a single point. But if we dig deeper, there seems to be some questions:

• Why do some large social networks suddenly disappear or lose out to new smaller ones?
• Why is it that small networks with excellent tool experience ultimately fail to attract enough users, while those that seem to have no practical use can?
• Why do some social networks lose their original value when their user base surges?

The answers to all these questions lie in the study of social capital. How does a social network help people accumulate social capital, and how does it balance the game between users in this process? To be more frank, how should social products intentionally or unintentionally take advantage of the fact that "human beings are essentially status-seeking monkeys"?

Quote: If I'm fake I ain't notice cause my followers ain't.

Translated into Chinese, it means: Even if I am fake, I won’t notice because my followers are not fake.

Social Capital Framework

The traditional view is that social networks can bring practical utility and entertainment to people, but I would like to expand it to a third dimension: social capital.

However, in this article, we will prioritize analyzing two of them, Utility and Social Capital, because entertainment is too complex and requires separate explanation.

So it becomes:

Most of the time, we can clearly perceive the practical utility of social networks. For example, Facebook and WeChat allow you to contact many people and learn about their dynamics. WhatsApp and WeChat help you communicate and video chat with people all over the world without paying SMS fees. These are all practical utilities.

But how do we understand social capital? How do we use social networks to accumulate social capital? How do we measure it?

The competition among social networks for practical utility is Darwinian, rational, and extremely clear. For example, the fastest text message transmission and the most stable video conference transmission quality are the core competitiveness.

But they leave little room for imagination; it is more interesting to analyze the process of helping people acquire social capital.

With the rise of Instagram (photos) and Snapchat (videos), for a long time, people believed that new social networks would be built on new media. But the form of the media may not be the most important, but the underlying mechanism.

Coincidentally, in order to simulate the underlying mechanisms of successful social networks, we introduce the concepts and principles of cryptocurrency.

Social Networks as ICO's

Why a new social network is like an ICO

• Each social network releases a new kind of social capital
• You must show proof of work (POW) to get tokens
• As time goes by, it will become increasingly difficult to mine tokens on each social network, which is the deflationary effect.
• Many people (especially the elderly) do not understand or want to look at social networks and cryptocurrencies.

1 and 4 do not need to be explained. Let's focus on 2 and 3:

All social networks require something from you to gain social capital.

• For example, on Facebook/WeChat Moments, you need to update interesting statuses;
• Instagram, which needs to be updated with interesting photos;
• Vine/TikTok/Kuaishou need to update interesting short videos.

Similarly, for Quora, Reddit and Twitch, Zhihu, Weibo and Jike, you can completely reverse-engineer the proof of work (POW) they require from the mechanisms of these social networks.

(One more thing about social capital: you may complain that your updates are better and more interesting than those of celebrities, but you don’t get the same level of feedback. This is normal. Because social capital can be transferred across platforms, there is innate social capital, and there is also a pre-mining mechanism for tokens.)

If you join a social network early enough, you will know that it is easier to obtain social capital (number of fans, likes, etc.) than others. For example, Twitter, Weibo, Zhihu, and Jike, their early users have a natural advantage and have accumulated a large number of fans. And this is only possible because they joined early enough.

As more and more people join the same network, there will inevitably be a scramble for social capital. Everyone will be more familiar with the rules of the game, so the competition will become more intense.

Why Proof of Work Matters

As with cryptocurrencies, if a platform’s social capital is too easy to acquire, then it has no value. Value is about scarcity, and the scarcity of social networks comes from proof of work (POW).

Remember the first principle we talked about? People are status-seeking monkeys. And status itself is relative. If everyone can achieve a certain status, then in fact no one really has "status".

For short video platforms like Musical.ly, Douyin, and Kuaishou, it is not easy for most people to gain fans and status (because it is difficult to publish an interesting video), so they don’t use it at first. But for others (such as early teenagers, professional MCN agencies, and people with free time in "sinking" areas), it is relatively cost-effective, so they flock to it.

This is our second principle, that people will look for the most efficient ways to accumulate the most social capital.

To give a counterexample, why can't some tool products be smoothly transitioned to social networks?

Prisma, a photo filter tool, was very popular when it was first released. It can turn your photos into artistic paintings with one click, and the operation is very simple and smooth.

The problem is that it is too concise and smooth.

Since any photo can be turned into a nice-looking work of art with the click of a button, none of them can really stand out. It lacks a mechanism/ability to give users a truly valuable social asset.

In contrast, although Instagram was also a filter tool in its early days, the improvements it could bring were relatively limited. Truly recognized photos still rely on the photographer’s composition skills and subject selection, which is difficult and requires proof of work, so the social capital generated can be recognized and worth pursuing.

This is certainly not the only reason for the success of social networks. As mentioned earlier, practical utility and entertainment can also bring about social networks. But introducing the concept of social capital helps us explain why some seemingly meaningless, valueless, and useless social networks are successful.

Facebook's Original Proof of Work

Facebook was not really understood and revered until it became Facebook. But how did it beat MySpace in the early days? You know, at the beginning, it was just text status updates, not much different from its competitors.

In fact, its original proof of concept is famous: you had to be a student at Harvard. By signing up with a campus email address, Facebook became a de facto "elite filter."

As it expanded, first targeting the Ivy League and then college users, Facebook has always maintained a narrow age and education-based exclusivity and has expanded with restraint.

Social Capital ROI

If a person posts interesting content on the platform, how quickly can they get likes, comments, and followers? This is about how long it takes for users to understand the platform rules and adapt to them.

For example, young people use social media most frequently and are most sensitive to ROI. Young people in the United States tend to dislike Twitter and prefer Instagram.

It’s not that it’s hard to be popular on Twitter. Every once in a while, there are tweets that get over 10,000 likes or retweets (maybe Twitter could try to aggregate these into paper products to make up for its monetization ability). But it’s not common, and most tweets are never seen.

Relatively speaking, Instagram is the preferred social platform for young people because, although there is no forwarding option, it allows almost unlimited tags, which is conducive to subsequent distribution and naturally allows young users to perceive that its return on investment is high enough.

(For investors and social product managers, it should be interesting to always post some representative content on different social networks with various test accounts to track their social capital return rate and liquidity.)

When it comes to improving the return on investment of social capital, there is another key point: whether the functions of the social network are sufficient to increase the dissemination of content.

Traditional social network reposts are being beaten back by recommendation algorithm feeds because the former rely on fans themselves and are difficult to activate and effectively improve the return on investment of new players in acquiring social capital.

The rise of Tik Tok and Toutiao proves to some extent that machine recommendations have the potential to break through social media and achieve higher distribution efficiency. On such platforms, algorithms take precedence over the number of followers. Fans follow a celebrity out of love, but if they don’t look for him/her next time, they still won’t be able to see his/her content. On the other hand, celebrities should please algorithms, not fans.

This means that the feedback loop brought by machine recommendations is more effective, tighter, and more reliable than a loose relationship chain. In theory, later users are more likely to obtain a higher return on social capital investment through high-quality content and thus stand out.

Think about it from another angle. If it is a mechanism of following and being followed, this type of network can reward those who gain a large number of fans in the early stage, so that their new content has the possibility of achieving greater exposure, rather than gaining new attention entirely because of the quality of the content.

This is why social networks are losing their vitality: old social capital cannot be cleared and revitalized, and newcomers will lose the motivation to rely on the mechanism to obtain high social capital returns.

From this point on, investors and even curious onlookers can measure the distribution efficiency and fairness of social networks and machine algorithms by publishing various test content.

Whether it is financial capital or social capital, activating its liquidity and providing possibilities for latecomers is the key to maintaining the vitality of the system.

Why copying proof of work is a lousy strategy?

We often see new social networks (trying to) appear one after another, but in reality many of them are imitations of each other. App.net and Mastodon are clones of Twitter, with some differences, but not much difference.

Most of these clones have or will fail because in the Status as a Service game, they simply copy the proof of work of another product. If the proof of work is the same, then you haven’t really created a new social capital, and the new network will not be large enough to convince people to switch to you at the beginning.

There is also the issue of first-mover advantage here. Large (high social capital) platforms/KOLs can quickly learn new features of emerging upstarts and graft them onto the dominant existing platforms. After all, copying and killing is an effective strategy for incumbents.

The most discussed case is Facebook copying Snapchat's Stories and transplanting it to Instagram. I think the Stories format is an innovation in the form of content that reduces social pressure.

Publishing quality content is certainly good for gaining social capital, but too much updating can also have the opposite effect. In order to make viewers take the "responsibility" of viewing content and ensure that everyone updates without worry, Stories came into being. So much so that later, any social network that found that the growth momentum was not right would try to graft this format into its own network at some point.

But ironically, as various products add more and more filters and features to the Stories format, the difficulty of proof of work required to publish Stories is also escalating. It can be found that many Stories on Instagram are now even more elaborate and time-consuming than ordinary posts.

This means that you might be able to temporarily free the monkey from the status-seeking game, but not for long.

The Greatest Social Capital Creation Event in Tech History

In the history of global technology, the biggest social capital boom event was the launch of News Feed by Facebook.

Before News Feed, if you were on MySpace or Facebook, you had to click on each person's profile individually and then keep jumping back and forth. In hindsight, it's ridiculous that users of social networks have to bear such a heavy burden in consuming content.

By combining all updates from all the accounts you follow into one continuous default interface, Facebook's News Feed not only made the distribution of new posts more efficient, it also put all posts on a single playing field, pitting them against each other. At the same time, all publishers seemed to be suddenly placed on the same vast stage, performing for an audience.

It is foreseeable that there will be a content explosion after this. The number of posts has increased, and people's interactions have increased. Initially, users who are not used to this form are complaining about News Feed, but their bodies are honest. Fortunately, Facebook has withstood the pressure and looked at the data instead of paying too much attention to public opposition.

That golden age also quickly sparked a passion for accumulating social capital. Why did that post get 10 times more likes than mine? Which of my posts are the most popular? Now we all talk about machine learning, but humans, as social creatures, are just as good at deciphering information.

As the path of posting, following, learning, and reposting becomes more optimized, the feedback process becomes faster and faster. People start following more and more accounts on social networks, content becomes overloaded, and the signal-to-noise ratio drops to a level that affects user engagement.

As a result, almost any social network ultimately turns to the same solution: distribution through algorithms.

Will the arms race of social capital continue to escalate? Some people are now beginning to lament the irrational prosperity of social networks, while others are beginning to advocate greater transparency and more authentic self-expression, that is, anti-Facebook.

Indeed, Path has managed to be the anti-Facebook: it has far fewer users than Facebook. If you agree that people want to accumulate social capital as efficiently as possible, then limiting them in this way is a very challenging business model.

Why Social Capital Accumulation Skews Young?

I'd love to see a chart on social capital. I'd bet that young people (especially teenagers) are the ones who dominate the game. A lot of social networking is a young person's game, and adults are probably living in the Cambrian era compared to them.

Although we are all status monkeys, when new social networks emerge, young people tend to be the first to adopt them, and probably always will be. Let’s take a quick look at why this is the case.

First, adults already have more social capital, such as job titles, spouses, children, houses, real estate, cars, furniture, resumes, etc. Young people are usually poor in social capital, and the fastest and most effective way for them to gain social capital is social media (or video games).

Secondly, since adults have already accumulated a lot of social capital, they have mastered more effective ways, which are much more efficient than on social networks. It's like mastering a large amount of assets and just putting them in the bank and waiting to earn interest. This is just a mathematical consideration. Don't forget that people generally have another characteristic, loss aversion.

This is actually related to the second principle we talked about at the beginning: people will choose the most effective way to accumulate their social capital. Young and old people should pursue the best strategy.

Finally, young people have something in excess that most adults complain they don’t have enough of: time. Because they are young, they can waste some time exploring new social networks and deciding whether it is attractive to acquire social capital from them, whereas most adults wait until a social network has established a real market before joining.

The common situation of young people: There are many me: "I contain multitudes"

Teenagers and people in their twenties tend to have multiple identities more than older people. For example, a middle school student has one identity with classmates and another with family members; a person in his twenties has one identity with colleagues during the day and another identity with friends outside of work. The gaps between these areas are often large, and they are unwilling to merge their identities.

Combined with the younger generation’s preference for visual communication, this explains why the preferred social networks for young people are Instagram and Snapchat, both of which outperform Facebook. Instagram makes it easy to create multiple accounts to match one person’s multiple identities, while Snapchat can provide the best visual information for a specific recipient.

Facebook, by contrast, places too much emphasis on responding to the real world and being tied to a single identity.

Common Social Network Arcs

Through the utility-social capital dual-axis model we mentioned earlier, we can try to understand how social networks develop over time.

Develop utility first, then social capital

This is a typical development path of "come for the tool, stay for the relationship". Instagram is a good example, it has grown from a filter tool to an image-based social network.

I think most social networks will eventually have to revert to being utilities in order to truly last.

Develop social capital first, then utility

Come for the fame, stay for the tools?

That's what Foursquare is to me. In the beginning, I actually signed up to get some interesting title in a certain area. But now, Foursquare is becoming a practical tool that provides information about the places around you, rather than just a weird distributed social capital game.

Wikipedia, Reddit, Quora, Weibo, etc. also belong to this category. Users will eventually use it as a tool.

Only useful, almost no social capital

Some products try to build a utility network, but they provide little access to social capital for users. Most IM tools fall into this category. They connect you to people you already know, but they can hardly introduce you to new people.

The best of these products can reach over a billion users, but competition is often fierce because in the digital world, a truly useful feature is too easy to copy.

There is social capital, but the actual utility is not obvious

When a social network loses its vitality before establishing real utility, the social assets on it will depreciate faster than you can imagine.

Some people might think that Foursquare, which I mentioned earlier, should be put here, but what I really want to discuss is Facebook. I don't think Facebook has no real utility. At some point, it is even the mobile Internet itself. And for more than a billion people, Messenger is also a very useful IM tool.

But let's take the US, a key market for Facebook that has fared poorly in terms of monetization. A lot of people I know have given up Facebook in the past year with little to no impact on their daily lives.

The last one is the most worth talking about: social capital and utility exist at the same time

Most social networks offer both to some degree, but none do it better than WeChat.

One only needs to compare the service lists of WeChat and Alipay to discover Facebook’s weakness in the payment business.

Whether it can really play a role in commercialization and payment business depends on the long-term thinking and resource utilization of Facebook and its subsidiaries (such as WhatsApp and Instagram). In the past, they have made a lot of efforts, such as improving the search experience on Facebook, making Facebook a payment method, and even introducing virtual assistants on Messenger. But all have little effect.

In the future, will Facebook’s introduction of cryptocurrency and Instagram’s new attempts to promote commercialization help improve the current situation?

What determines the social network ceiling? Social Network Asymptote

#1 Proof of Work

How do you tell when a social network stops growing? Why do social networks have a natural ceiling?

Going back to our cryptocurrency analogy, the choice of proof of work is the primary reason.

For example, the former Musical.ly is now Tik Tok.

Many people have watched Tik Tok videos, have you ever tried to shoot one yourself? I guess many people haven’t tried it, and they will never try it.

Whatever the reason, TikTok creators will eventually be limited by proof of work, and not everyone can become a creator and gain social capital from it. The same is true for Twitter and Weibo: there are only a limited number of people who like to write 140 or 280 characters. The number of contributors determines the upper limit of a social network.

Of course, this is not to say that introducing proof of work is wrong. But if you want to measure the true value of a social network, the type of proof of work is a key variable that must be considered. It can help you understand why Musical.ly eventually stopped growing and why TikTok reached its ceiling.

To understand the ceiling of a social network, we must first ask how many people have the skills and interest to compete in this field and gain social capital.

#2 Social Capital Inflation and Devaluation

Why is it that for some social networks, stopping growth is not the end, but decline and extinction is?

To understand the fragility of Status as a Service businesses, we need to understand the volatility of Status.

• 2.1: Social Capital Interest Rate Hikes

We mentioned earlier that if a social network achieves a certain level of success, it will grow to the point where it needs algorithms to improve distribution efficiency to help most users maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio and prevent churn. This is a bit like the Federal Reserve preventing inflation by raising interest rates.

But when Facebook changed its algorithm and distributed content to News Feed, the original winners noticed the problem. In the past, as long as you get enough fans' attention through high-quality content, you can solidify them into a social asset, which means subsequent stable traffic and reach.

But now that Facebook has become the central bank of attention, it can control the liquidity of content, thereby curbing the abuse of social assets by early winners. Although Facebook believes that it is necessary to guard against the tragedy of the commons, the early winners do not have such awareness and restraint.

• 2.2: Social Capital Deflation & Scarcity

Another risk of social networks is that because the network effect is too strong and too dependent on social capital itself, once a reversal occurs, there is almost no way to recover.

Why is it irreversible? Going back to the model we used to judge the value of social networks, it is because its utility often has no real value. If it is a payment tool, it can maintain users through real utility. Social networks cannot.

An eternal problem of social networks is that they cannot escape the evaporative cooling effect. Once users with too much social capital choose to leave, the value of the social capital in the network will inevitably be affected. Therefore, it is often found that after a group of real top users are lost, unless the network can improve its actual utility as much as possible, it is difficult to delay the decline.

This can be understood by comparing it to the fashion industry. The fashion industry has repeated booms and busts, and the popular styles of a certain season claimed by magazine editors and fashion designers are accepted because some of them have the right to speak. This is actually the social capital of the fashion industry, so it seems valuable.

The technology industry (especially social products) may need to learn how to manage "scarcity" from the fashion industry.

Another type of social capital scarcity may be caused by different user groups. For example, when young people’s parents start using Facebook, young people will choose to leave.

How Snapchat Mitigate Social Capital Devaluation Risk

At the end of last year, a memo sent by Snapchat CEO to internal employees was leaked. Evan Spiegel reminded the team to reflect on a question: whether Snapchat is still adhering to its core value - becoming the fastest way to communicate.

This actually fits in with the social network analysis framework I mentioned earlier: Snapchat intends to advance actual utility while sacrificing a certain amount of social capital, which is a more stable long-term strategy.

Anyone familiar with Snapchat knows that its loyal users basically don't use Facebook. Snapchat's real rival is Instagram, which does have a stronger mechanism for accumulating social capital.

And how does Snapchat continue to optimize its social capital building mechanism?

Initially, Snapchat created a best friend list, which was very popular among teenagers because it showed the three people you communicated with most frequently on your interface. In essence, it was equivalent to making a scoreboard that recorded the depth of "friendship" between users and made it public.

This is obviously a mechanism to encourage users to accumulate social capital. However, from the platform's perspective, this function has a big limitation: the number of best friends each user has is very limited. In other words, this mechanism makes the ceiling for accumulating social capital too low.

How to reverse this zero-sum mechanism and lead users to a game with a higher ceiling? Snapchat soon came up with a new idea: the Streaks feature.

What is this feature? Simply put, if you and your friends frequently send photos to each other, different Emoji statuses will be displayed next to their usernames. For example, the fire 🔥 symbol means that the chat frequency is very high, the hourglass ⏳ symbol means that you are about to miss the other party's message, and so on.

So in the end, your address book will look like this:

As mentioned earlier, these symbols are proof of your work in chatting with friends. Many young people value them so much that they keep chatting with friends to prevent the symbols from disappearing. In other words, this is the social capital they care about and can't give up.

Lengthening the Half-life of Status Games

If the proof of work on a social network doesn’t continue to iterate, eventually everyone mining the social currency will get fatigued. As a result, people may stop playing the status game. If the social network doesn’t make progress in terms of actual utility at this point, it will likely become obsolete.

Video games are a great example of this; have you noticed that a lot of the big hits seem to have a life cycle of about 18 months?

When a new game is first launched, the levels and challenges are new to everyone, and players are very enthusiastic. But eventually, when everyone has figured out the rules, everyone's order will almost stabilize (because mature players will reach a relatively stable level at this time). In addition, because everyone is familiar with the game's challenge mode, the motivation brought by the sense of achievement will disappear.

Big IP games like Call of Duty manage the user lifecycle by releasing new versions regularly. Each game environment is familiar but a completely new challenge, which helps extend the life of the game.

For example, some MMORPG games (such as "World of Warcraft") are good at providing other incentives for players, such as a sense of community, which is also a way to extend their own attractiveness cycle.

I even think that new social networks should delve more deeply into these similar but older “social capital games” such as the fashion industry, religion, and society itself.

Social Capital Accumulation and Storage

As with cryptocurrency, there is no point in pursuing social capital if you can’t hold it and store it safely. Almost all successful social networks are good at providing accumulation and storage mechanisms.

This seems very natural now, but in the early days, many apps did not consider this, so the value of them leaked to other social networks.

For example, Hipstamatic is a filter tool that existed before Instagram. It is different from Instagram in that it charges for filters, has no profile page, no feed, and does not guide users to become a social network. People use it to beautify photos and then post them to Facebook and other social networks.

In other words, Hipstamatic provided actual utility but did not capture the social capital that came with it.

Musical.ly is a good example of this. They invented a unique proof of work and were very clear about capturing the value of the social capital mined by users through short video content.

Because they don’t want users to upload it to Instagram or Facebook, they created a feed stream in the app, which helped users build a market for accumulating and exchanging value. The founders of Musical.ly once publicly stated that they actually wanted to build a new social network (or even a new "country").

For most social networks, this model is not difficult to understand. However, we need to further study those "social networks" where it is extremely difficult to accumulate social capital.

For example, anonymous social networks. The value of this kind of social network lies in the fact that anonymity allows users to say things they would not say if they used their real names. But the weakness of this mechanism is that users cannot really obtain the social capital they have mined.

“Social networks” like Reddit attempt to address this asymmetric incentive problem by decoupling social capital from real identity and reputation, but this will be a long struggle.

(Balaji Srinivasan once mentioned that perhaps one day, cryptocurrencies can allow a person to extract value from an anonymous social network without having to disclose their identity, but at least for now, this so-called "currency" solution is not successful.)

Social Capital Arbitrage: Social Capital Arbitrage

Because social networks attract different audiences, and even if there are overlapping users, there is no significant impact on the value of social capital in a single network, there is actually an opportunity to conduct social capital arbitrage across applications.

For example, an account on Instagram called thefatjewish, whose real name is Josh Ostrovsky, has millions of followers on Instagram, but this depends largely on moving content from other social networks such as Twitter.

His success pointed the way for some people. After that, similar "joke aggregator" accounts on Instagram surged, with some following the rules and labeling sources, but more people not following the rules.

It can be foreseen that as long as there are multiple social networks, social capital arbitrageurs will inevitably continue this transfer work in order to accumulate social capital for themselves.

In fact, before the Internet, men quoted movies or jokes they heard during chats, which was also an older social capital arbitrage. However, when the Internet was available, the action began to grow in a geometric multiple.

Conclusion: Everybody Wants to Rule the World

Many large technology companies are essentially engaged in the service industry. Perhaps some people are reluctant to admit that they like the process of pursuing status and the incentives they receive.

From the user's perspective, people are talking more and more about social software on their phones, and keeping them online for a long time. So you can also say that StaaS (Status as a Service) is essentially a FOMO as a Service. That is, social networks help people get rid of their imagined FOMO, but fall into the real FOMO.

What to say, if you want control of your own happiness, don't tie it to someone else's scoreboard.)

This article comes from the WeChat public account "Journal of Human Resources and Social Security" (ID: Zhirens)

Author | Eugene Wei,

Amazon's first analyst in strategy department, formerly head of product at Hulu and Flipboard

Original text: | https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

Translation | Xishengxiang@ Yourseeker