Do you expect other people to read and summarize, so that you don't have to? (I'm guessing "Yes" - which is why you asked...)

Do you generally get a good response to this? Or ignored? Or a hostile response?

"too long; don't read"

Summary Despite this, most of the social media networks we study generate much more social capital than actual financial capital, especially in their early stages; almost all such companies have internalized one of the popular truisms of Silicon Valley, that in the early days, companies should postpone revenue generation in favor of rapid network scaling.

What ties many of these explanations together is social capital theory, and how we analyze social networks should include a study of a social network's accumulation of social capital assets and the nature and structure of its status games.

However, in general, if you come to a social network later, unless you bring incredible exogenous social capital (Taylor Swift can join any social network on the planet and collect a massive following immediately), the competition for attention is going to be more intense than it was in the beginning.

It's not that the existence of old money or old social capital dooms a social network to inevitable stagnation, but a social network should continue to prioritize distribution for the best content, whatever the definition of quality, regardless of the vintage of user producing it.

A social network like Path attempted to limit your social graph size to the Dunbar number, capping your social capital accumulation potential and capping the distribution of your posts.

If this generational divide on social media between the old and the young was simply a one-time anomaly given the recent birth of social networks, and if future generations will be virtual status-seeking experts for womb to tomb, then capturing users in their formative social media years becomes even more critical for social networks.

There, many social networks allow you to directly turn your social capital into financial capital, without leaving the network.

It's a fun analogy, though I prefer the cryptocurrency metaphor because most users are citizens of multiple social networks in the tech world, managing their social capital assets across all of those networks as a sort of diversified portfolio of status.

It's strange to think that social networks like Twitter and Facebook once allowed users to just wholesale export their graphs to other networks since it allowed competing networks to jumpstart their social capital assets in a massive way, but that only goes to show how even some of the largest social networks at the time underestimated the massive value of their social capital assets.

As long as we have multiple social networks that don't quite work the same way, there will continue to be these social media arbitragers copying work from one network and to a different network to accumulate social capital on closing the distribution gap.