The bottom lineThe Self-reference Effect can be a powerful tool when designing communications and experiences. Reflecting customers’ personal identities, preferences and beliefs can drive engagement, brand love, and sales.When it comes to applying the Self-reference Effect to your experience, ask yourself:How deeply do we know our customers? Not just their demographic information, but their thoughts, fear, goals, and aspirations? Does our experience reflect how they see themselves?Are we creating experiences that reflect the customer’s environment? For example, are people getting ads for winter coats when it’s 80 degrees outside? If it’s cold outside, are we trying to sell them ice cream? Is there something unique about where they live and work that we need to take into consideration when designing their experience?

Most of these near clones have and will fail. The reason that matching the basic proof of work hurdle of an Status as a Service incumbent fails is that it generally duplicates the status game that already exists. By definition, if the proof of work is the same, you're not really creating a new status ladder game, and so there isn't a real compelling reason to switch when the new network really has no one in it.

What Favstar and Favrd did was surface really great tweets and rank them on a scoreboard, and that, to me, launched the performative revolution in Twitter. It added needed feedback to the feedback loop, birthing a new type of comedian, the master of the 140 character or less punchline (the internet has killed the joke, humor is all punchline now that the setup of the joke is assumed to be common knowledge thanks to Google).

Value is tied to scarcity, and scarcity on social networks derives from proof of work. Status isn't worth much if there's no skill and effort required to mine it.

Almost every social network of note had an early signature proof of work hurdle. For Facebook it was posting some witty text-based status update. For Instagram, it was posting an interesting square photo. For Vine, an entertaining 6-second video. For Twitter, it was writing an amusing bit of text of 140 characters or fewer. Pinterest? Pinning a compelling photo. You can likely derive the proof of work for other networks like Quora and Reddit and Twitch and so on. Successful social networks don't pose trick questions at the start, it’s usually clear what they want from you.

Jane Goodall theory of how to study your subject

Musical.ly.