🦹‍♂️

The dark art of manufacturing status badges

Case studies

  • Manifold
    • Verified = famous, well known folks
    • Moderator = doing the work
  • Manifund:
    • Regrantors
  • Manifest
    • Speakers
    • Volunteers
  • Now: Mox Visitor program?

External examples:

  • Harvard, YC
  • Emergent Ventures
  • Future Fund Regranting tried something interesting, make the list of regrantors private to avoid “status badging”
    • Very thoughtful; though did have some weird dynamics around you having a weird convo with someone only to realize later they are figuring out if they can offer you money for sth
    • Also kind of requires that you know someone in the space

Ickiness of status badges

  • Seems a bit bad for the soul, to be stack ranking your friends and acquaintances and people you meet and people you don’t even know
    • One aspect of Austin that Rachel mentioned liking is that, early on in the relationship, he didn’t do the EA thing of “during a first meeting, silently judging whether this person is worth your time”.
      • I was proud of this. And I’m worried that running Mox pressures me into doing this more; esp that focus on “attracting great people”.
    • Taco Tuesday, Manifest have been open invite and it mostly works
  • Also weird, perhaps offensive
    • It’s a piece that prevents me from open sourcing the Mox Airtable
      • Priority went from P1/P2/P3 to Amazing/Great/Good, but… not sure that’s any better
    • Unless in a context where people already expect it (like speakers at a conference)
      • Even among speakers, we’d have a rough “how great is this person” ordering in our Airtable that helps us prioritize who to reach out to, and I’m a bit scared of that ever leaking
  • Reducing things down to a single comparable dimension maybe isn’t right, or leaves a lot off the table?
    • Different status ladders (EA AIS vs SF tech) imply different things
    • Idea: different tracks in your CRM
    • People are super high dimensional
      • But: when you’re dealing with hundreds if not thousands of connections, very useful to have quick takes
    • How to export what my brain does with judgement into an LLM?
  • Good status badges: Lists of people (Patrick Collison, Guzey)
    • (but even then, still a bit bad for the soul, perhaps?)
    • Nobody bats an eye at the Twitter follow mechanism, or Substack subscription mechanism
      • Twitter Verified, or Twitch Partner, etc do have some issues though
  • Two axes:
    • The Commons vs Constellation
    • Community vs Gatekept
    • Helping members vs helping the world
    • Pluralistic vs Monoculture
    • Fun vs Serious
    • Bottom up vs Top Down
  • (or maybe it’s a vector space and Mox wants to be on the pareto frontier)

Misc notes