In studying economics, one of the major things that you learn is that there are many externalities that are not accounted for when determining the value of something in a market. Explained further here, "Externalities create divergence between social benefit and private benefit and between social cost and private cost."

In thinking about this, much of the value that has been created by Silicon Valley does not take into account the social costs that the technologies accrue, because the SV community itself is largely insulated from the rest of the world. While I disagree with the politics of the author of the article linked below, this quote hits the nail on the head:

"Silicon Valley’s biggest failing is not poor marketing of its products, or follow-through on promises, but, rather, the distinct lack of empathy for those whose lives are disturbed by its technological wizardry." source

Twitter announced the launch of their Spark Program yesterday which is billed as "a three-month accelerator initiative that’s designed to discover and reward great Spaces on Twitter with financial, technical, and marketing support." My initial thought was that this is a positive signal for $TWTR investors as well as creators on the platform, but after listening in on a Twitter Space earlier, it became clear to me that many in the community are frustrated by the exclusion of smaller creators who don't necessarily have the time or resources to devote to acquiring followers but have extensive knowledge on given subject areas—as an example, NFTs.

The people who tend to spend their time creating value on a given platform are generally people who are able to correctly identify the opportunity that exists in investing their time. However, many people who tend to be the most knowledgeable about a particular topic are generally much more low-key and humble about it, and can't always identify why it would be worth their time to showcase their knowledge on a public forum. Put simply, many smart people look down upon social media. The question then becomes: how do we educate those on the power of putting oneself out there on social media, while not hating on those who are able to grow their influence more quickly because they invest the time & effort?

While this move may be great for shareholders, this rug pull from small creators who are no longer able to host their own Twitter Spaces—because they lack the numbers— has many externalities that are not being quantified. Basic economics stipulates that when you put floors or ceilings on things, namely followers in this example, it doesn't allow the market to freely decide who or what should be the most successful. A better metric to look into might be the momentum that a creator is experiencing, as opposed to how many followers that they have.

In my first publication of this post, I said the move by Twitter to require applicants to their Spark program to have 5000+ followers signaled that there's still a huge empathy gap that people don't understand, but upon further study, I now see that this is not the case whatsoever. Corporations have to make money, and they are always going to reward those individuals who decide to invest their time—regardless of their circumstances—to create an audience that will then consistently return back to said company's platform, for them.

While I agree that SV and the greater tech ecosystem is a bubble, it's unfair to say that empathy should equal lowering the bar to entry. Unfortunately for society, too many people think with their hearts rather than their brains, and this ends up causing most—if not all—of our disagreements. If as a society we want to converge social and private benefits with social and private costs, we have to look more broadly at how we can properly align incentives between people and corporations, while not lowering the bar to entry.