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.

> 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.