Status Anxiety as a Service | Hacker News Reader

Status Anxiety as a Service

noahpinion.substack.com

34 pointsjger156 comments

> Twitter creates the instantaneous illusion of social equality between influencers and normal people, but then it periodically reminds you that it’s an illusion.

I noticed a kind of "illusion of community" on Reddit.

E.g., you arrive late to a sub where, say, a female poster complained about her boyfriend. Skimming the comments you see a fairly wholesome thread. Thoughtful comments, innocuous thread-game digressions, good faith advice and disagreements, etc. You even see the OP responding to these and it all seems like an obviously valuable conversation.

Then you start unfolding some of the lower-scored comments. You find trolling, misogynistic statements, nasty insults, bad faith questions that turn into abuse. Worse-- you find OP had the bad fortune of interacting with many of these low quality posters before the mods and participants cleaned up the overallcontent by hiding them.

If you skim the top subs of Reddit, you're almost always following this pattern of reading the moderated content of a thread that originally had a much higher percent of visible abusive content. It seems like the digital equivalent of enjoying watching an organized sport, then joining the team and getting hazed in the lockeroom.

> As Twitter ages and the distribution of status gets even more frozen in, Twitter will have to rely on status anxiety more and more to keep new users engaged. That will exacerbate the toxic dynamics of Twitter, where every statement is willfully misinterpreted, humor is nigh-impossible, and bad-faith attacks are the universal norm.

I’m not sure why Twitter cares whether new users are engaged in terms of replying. Twitter’s business is selling ads, and they just need readers for that, not replies. As long as there is enough interesting new content, then readers will keep coming back.

I think this is a very interesting analysis of the social dynamics of Twitter, but only the part of Twitter that is actively posting and replying. And that is a very small part; Pew says that 92% of tweets come from only 10% of Twitter active users.

>Being able to reply to high-status people, whether they want you to or not, is a heady status-conferring experience. You can say mean shit to the most famous Hollywood movie star, and there’s nothing he can do about it. Or you can say something nice, and hopefully get a reply or a shout-out. This puts you on a plane of near-equality with people who otherwise tower over the social landscape.

Are there any young celebrities who don't have a presence on social media?

I wonder how that would affect public perception of them vs the ones who do.

Rami Malek, the guy who played Elliot in Mr.Robot and Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody has no presence as far as I am aware. To me he seems to value privacy over status.

AFAIK Jennifer Lawrence doesn’t have any public social media accounts either.

And what qualifies as a “big” account keeps increasing as the platform ages; six or seven years ago, 200k would have been a huge number of followers, but now it’s only OK, since so many other people have now reached 500k or more. In other words, the more years Twitter exists, the more years of each person’s life would be needed to build up a large amount of social capital on the platform.

Thought this was a great point. Does anyone know where one might find data on the distribution of followers on twitter and other socials?

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