Everyone loves to knock social media for value signaling. I think that gets it backwards. Social media might be the best place we’ve ever had for people to show what they actually stand for.
The problem is that the signal is polluted. Mixed in with the people who give are people using the same platforms to pull money out. They build funnels that look like generosity, and they’ve gotten very good at it. From the outside, every number you can measure points the same way for both groups. Likes, follows, posting habits: identical.
So I’ve been building a test. It asks one question: is this person putting value into the network, or taking it out?
It doesn’t try to read minds. It looks at four things you can actually see. Where do their links and asks point, back to themselves or out to others? Do they lift up people who can’t pay them back? When their views change, does that line up with learning something or with a new revenue stream? And do the people they promote go on to wins that have nothing to do with them?
Two rules keep it honest. First, consistency doesn’t earn points. Never changing your mind can just mean you’ve stopped thinking. Second, it scores where value flows, not whether you’re a good person or share my taste. Plenty of people I’d happily have a beer with would score as extractors.
Any method like this has to answer one question out loud: can it be gamed? Here’s the answer. I call it the Pandora Lock. The test is built so that faking it costs exactly as much as doing it. Scores come from years of history, which nobody can backdate. The strongest signals come from what other people say you did for them, not what you say about yourself. And every user tunes their own version, so there’s no single formula to game. The only way to fake a giver score is to give, for years. At that point, congratulations, you’re a giver.
I’m not publishing scores, and I’m not naming anyone. Right now I want the thing that makes it better: where does this break? Who would it get wrong? Tell me the case I haven’t thought of.
I'll start, and of course, if it's from me, it's non-profit, education-facing, and maybe not that helpful if you're looking for use case in a for-profit environment. Sorry - maybe someone for-profit within the Substack Algorithim will help add for-profit use case examples.
Every disembodied social media exchange requires at least one additional interpretive step about trust. In person, whether I'm aware of it or not, I will interpret body language, tone of voice, and pace of movement and speaking, and I'll interpret all these utterances and movements as an animal first, then a rational animal (hopefully).
If the exchange is non-profit, there's value already in just posting a statement and seeing a response. How much depends on the medium, topic, and expressed goal of the platform. So some type of normative interpretation is needed to establish trust, person to person, group to group. Or not...if the goal is performative, especially to antagonize. See X since 2024ish. Are there inherent problems here? How difficult are they? For 2026 at least, it's more frowned upon to be platforming more digitized communication from HS down to K-2 or so.
Scott, no apology needed. Non-profit use cases are very interesting to me these days, and it's part of why I'm glad you're writing here: years of navigating trust between teachers, parents, students and districts is an angle almost nobody else posting on this has.
If I'm reading you right: online we lose the "animal first" read on trust, so we need shared norms to rebuild it, unless the point is performance.
I'll grant that completely. What we sense in the room is its own source of trust, and my post skipped it. I was only looking at the record: what someone has put in over years. Those are two different sources, and the second doesn't replace the first. That's going into the thinking. Thank you for beating it up.