These companies have sold investors on the value of their social graph. Nobody was quite sure what, exactly, that value is, but it I think it is clear that it h

These companies have sold investors on the value of their social graph. Nobody was quite sure what, exactly, that value is, but it I think it is clear that it has one. Early on, celebrities organically grew followings. This gave them a direct, bidirectional channel to their followers - there’s a value of the service, more than the graph. Later arrivals to the platform had a problem, and so did the service provider: how do you promote yourself to a broad subset of the network, quickly? Recommendation systems have been around for a long time, so that’s part of the solution. But if you wanted a quick spin up, word of mouth and algorithmic solutions weren’t going to go that far. And what if you had an unpopular brand and we’re looking to improve it? Those things almost worked against you. Deliberate promotion is another outlet, but people are looking for viral magnification of their message. This is, I would argue, a real value to the network. Spontaneous memetic propagation. This is possibly the only real value of the network at scale. But you can’t sell it, at least not directly. The appearance of deliberate, centralized control does not yield the desired result. People can distinguish emergent network behavior from facile promotion very easily, subconsciously even. The value of the network is in social ties. So people whose friends genuinely like something - they are more likely to like that thing, too. If the service provider is going to leverage the power of the network for themselves, they need these bot networks. They need to sell indirect access to the network, because direct access is not the desired product. And the network effect is very powerful, as we increasingly see isolated subgroups creating virtual echochambers, and others paying to exploit and shape those shape those sub graphs. These networks are powerful and potentially dangerous artifacts. I think we should have asked in 2009, could something like the Arab spring happen in a developed, stable nation? But nobody was asking that, I certainly wasn’t. It is a interesting time to be alive.