Status as a Service (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Status as a Service (2019)

eugenewei.com

I was hoping the article was about a paid service to increase your social status, bypassing proof of work... e.g. buying stars for Sneeches

Comments are closed in the article, and it's from 2019... But... How do you explain Google Reader then?

It was a super proof-of-work-oriented. The ones who used it where like gods of article sharing. I hade the best newsletters by persons I knew. And then one day... Poof. Whyyyy?

I will miss you forever Google Reader.

where do i find a list of all blog posts on this website without scrolling 10 miles down? I would like to see the titles of all posts

There's an RSS feed in the source code: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog?format=rss

Personal TL;DR this article interprets social media from two axies, utility and social capital. Fundemetal assumption being here that people seek both and if that is the case you can apply economic rules to it to understand how they operate. Hence they provide Social Status as a Service (StaaS).

High social status + High Utility = High Entertainment.

> if you want control of your own happiness, don’t tie it to someone else’s scoreboard.

A variation of this is as old as philosophy itself.

A variation of this is as old as Monty Python itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QereR0CViMY

Very long, but an outstanding article. I wish he'd blog more. That one is from 2019. Would love his take on the state of social in 2025.

He just did a pretty good long-form interview this past week:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/11-eugene-wei-amusing-...

tl;dr He walked away from social because the current incentives destroy your brain.

I'll check that out. Thanks for the link.

After I got married and had children my status seeking behavior basically vanished. Too busy.

Or maybe your status-seeking behaviors had already fulfilled their purpose and were no longer needed.

As the children leave the nest, their success becomes the status. Remember to push them to be doctors, lawyers or AI developers with a youtube channel.

Best read today. Social networks have a lot in common with cryptocurrency. Early adopters on instagram have a lot in common with early adopters with cryptomining computers in their bedroom.

One of his best - read it close to when it first came out. The idea that there is some minimum work level required really reframed my view re: how networks proliferate.

long, but very good!

> You can take the monkey out of the status-seeking game, but you can't take the status-seeking out of the monkey.

plenty of such gems

Humans are flesh and blood after all. Our entire higher brain only exists to serve the inner lizard.

This one is really very interesting. I will take reading it as a kind of enjoyment.

*Social* Status as a service?

As a hacker, I enjoy reading a few hundred words on some new optimisation method or an exciting new file system.

But I find it almost impossible to read thousands and thousands and thousands of words on wishy washy social ideas backed up by a few personal anecdotes and some tenuous links to reality.

This is a form of anti-intellectualism which is, for some reason, acceptable in technical circles. Probably because economic success gained by expertise in one field tends to make people think that expertise transfers to other fields. It’s a shame and the technology industry is worse off for it - especially as of late with all the half-baked philosophizing about AI.

Yes, the half in "Half-baked" is making long-winded assertions backed up with anecdotes not facts. [Editted]

It is anti-intellectual to blather on over pages and pages, trying to tell people how to live their lives without giving any information to show if ones statements are correct or not.

"Intellectual" is, for some reason, accepted in some circles as meaning longwinded unscientific musings, to which whole university departments are devoted. That does not mean it is not an utter waste of time and effort, that would be better spent on measuring things and giving advice that is actually shown to improve people's lives.

The tech anti-intellectualism is different though. Like you see these kinds of posts that approach the subject as if no one ever has seriously studied it, and the tell is always that there's barely a scholarly work cited, but there's plenty of metaphors to describe how say, sociological phenomena work by way of "it's just like XY tech or business model."

Like I get the acclaim, if you're raised in this environment, the business tech vocab will feel more familiar. Is it a good / better way to describe the world than the established scientific field? No.

But reading the "Peasant and his body" by Bourdieu instead would not have the same... social coinage in tech as reading the influencer of the realm.

Ignore and dismiss things like status as "wishy washy social ideas" at your own peril.

They might be referring just to the fact that it's difficult. I personally don't want to ignore them and I often don't. They're necessary and helpful in the real world, but that doesn't make it any easier.

I double that and would add that they also commented on the form (length, links…) rather than the substance.

I have ignored and dismissed the pseudosciences of horoscopes and psychology all my happy life.

People who need and look for this sort of advice would be well-served if it was backed up with anything factual, and are badly served when it is not.

Dismissing psychology is one reason you don't run a popular social network.

I'm no specialist in horoscope pseudoscience but it has helped me with dating a few times tho

I found it obnoxious that they started with 4 "Editor's Note" tangents, and the first sentence of the whole thing is "Look at how funny I am".

It's like all those YouTubers who start their videos with rambling on about what's new in their lives...

Just "explain like I am 5" to gpt and sit back.

That's why after scrolling I took it to Claude with the command: "Distill all of the novel insights and actionables in this."

So in fewer words it was:

> To create a successful social network, focus on providing a valuable single-user utility (utility) and a means for users to accumulate social capital, which drives growth and engagement. By understanding how social capital is created and maintained, you can design a network that fosters a positive flywheel of growth, leading to rapid expansion and user retention.

Distill more.

> Create a successful social network by providing a valuable utility and a way for users to accumulate social capital, which drives growth and engagement.

Distill more.

> Make social networks that give users value and help them gain status, and they will grow and engage.

Sounds like the dream we were sold in early 2010s. Connect people and everything will improve? Is that what the author meant?

> everything will improve

What domain "everything" belongs to? From the first recap it’s the company perspective:

> network […] rapid expansion and user retention

While the third distillation suggest the users will profit it:

> users […] will grow and engage

Social network history show us both are not necessarily aligned.

The "they" refers to the social networks I think. The human reader is the one making the leap.

LLMs are really great for summarizing these kinds of stories.

Are they? Who actually checks them?

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