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Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

The world operates as an unregulated market for social capital. To blame Twitter for that is a little absurd.

There are plenty of institutions in the world (the US Congress, Hacker News) that are markets for social capital with a design that orients itself towards a particular contributor. Blaming them for the right things is how they become better intuitions.

Social capital is still capital. If social capital is what draws users to Twitter, then Twitter's user engagement as a whole determines the value of its shares. If new users aren't able to gain that capital through Twitter, then Twitter's userbase will begin to stagnate, and its stock value will drop. Regardless of who's to "blame", this is undeniably a real problem.

I think that's a problem with an inter-networked world in general. Time and attention is finite, and there are now many sites, apps, and people competing for that attention. What you describe is every as relevant for aspiring YouTubers, bloggers, etc.

I agree that Twitter is included in that overarching problem, but I don't see it as their creation, and I'm not sure what they can do about it. (Facebook is in an easier position, being oriented primarily around family and friends, even though every brand on Earth also has a Facebook page.)

I wasn't talking about a general problem with capitalism. I'm saying that this is a unique problem that Twitter as a company has to face, for the reasons the article describes.

Twitter (and other technical platforms) afford technical and other means of addressing the lack of regulation. Actually, so does the real world, come to think of it.

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