Status as a Disservice

All great ideas eventually get misused. With the “$8 blue checks for all” era upon us, it seems we have reached a new low point for Eugene Wei’s seminal theory of social networking, Status as a Service, published in 2019.

The original theory makes perfect sense: people tend to seek the most efficient paths to gaining social status, and social networks succeed when they give a meaningful segment of the population a uniquely efficient path to winning status. But a fixation on digital status leads to boring apps that nobody wants to use (anyone remember BitClout?). I worry this type of thinking will degrade Twitter.

Thankfully, there is an antidote. Instead of focusing on symbols of status, Twitter—and really anyone building a social network—should focus on helping users create things for each other that have real value: entertainment, knowledge, and connection. A person’s status is ultimately a function of the value they create for others. Making the symbols of status more visible without increasing value creation is like printing money without increasing the productive capacity of the economy: it feels good in the short run but leads nowhere. We are entering a period of non-transitory status symbol inflation.

Twitter allowing anyone to buy a blue check makes about as much sense as Harvard allowing anyone to purchase a degree: the value proposition evaporates when anyone can get it. Predictably, some folks at Twitter realized they needed a new tier above the blue check to preserve a status hierarchy, even before the $8 blue check subscription service went live:

Then, hours into the rollout of the new “gray check” system, Elon Musk decided he didn’t like it:

But wait! The legacy status system lives on. If you click someone’s check, you can still see if they “earned” it (left) or merely bought it (right):

All this fiddling with badges and checks is clearly a waste of time. It degrades the value of Twitter’s platform and does its users a disservice. Instead of self-defeating $8 cash grabs, Twitter should focus on deepening its users’ ability to create value for each other in the form of entertainment, knowledge, and connection—and to bring more valuable creators into the network. It’s the only sustainable path forward.

There is no alternative. The reason most people care about Twitter is because of the people they meet, the ideas they get exposed to, and the laughs they have when discovering something amusing and strange. When we get the feeling that someone is just playing a status game, it’s boring and untrustworthy. (Hence the disdain for “threadbois.”)

That being said, social status is real, and people are motivated to get it. But how does status really work? And how can social platforms sustainably harness it?