Online Status Anxiety

The social platforms measure and proudly display everyone's friends, followers, karma, and rating in order to provide some level of trust within the network. Displaying these stats is just the most basic way of showing that user A is trusted and respected by many. I don't think it's enough though. Here on HN, we value each other by our comments and our accumulated karma. And there is a direct relation between these two. But is it really enough?

I might have more karma on HN than someone who headed the $10B research department at a large tech firm. I love that online I can be on the same standing with this person when we discuss a topic we're both passionate about. However, if people start to judge us solely by our karma, then I will certainly have an advantage and I don't think that would be fair. Karma is a good start but not enough. In real life, just knowing that so-and-so is the CTO of XYZ or Prof. Emeritus at ABC.edu is enough to make us stop and listen (regardless of whether we agree or not). Online, we use karma for the same reason i.e. to decide if we should even read the 10 paragraph post by some user named 'nld445'.

My point is that stats like friends, karma etc. are certainly useful but they do not carry over from real-life into online life or one online system to another. Attempts have been made to make universal online avatars with rating but nothing concrete yet. Twitter actually managed to bridge the 'real-life to online' gap by their 'account verified' star. If there truly was an easy way to merge how well-respected and noteworthy a person is in real life into the online world, nobody would care about the number of followers someone has. What I am certain of is that the one-dimensional karma system we have is not even close.