Shout! : design and analysis of an online marketplace for retweets

Abstract

In a world where attention is limited, popularity is an asset that allows those endowed with it to command attention on demand. Popularity, which we can approximate as the number of contacts in a person's network, allows journalists to share their stories with wider audiences, musicians to promote their creations to more fans, and entrepreneurs to secure more crowdfunding. However, since most modern social networking platforms treat popularity as non-tradeable and private, people are unable to leverage the popularity of their peers in their marketing efforts. If users were able to access the social networks of their close friends, they could multiply their reach without expending the effort normally necessary to build an expansive network. Here I present Shout!, a platform that allows friends to act as a group to coordinate their social media presence. Shout! is an online marketplace for retweets we launched in 2016. With Shout!, users can set up micro-contracts with their friends to exchange future retweets. Shout! allows the user to trigger these retweets through their friends' accounts when they need them. Shout! provides value to its users by allowing them to trade their social capital. In this thesis, I examine the meaning of social capital and the link between social media interactions and more traditional forms of capital. I then describe the design of Shout! and the major decisions made when building it. Finally, I evaluate the use of Shout! by early adopters and use the data collected to explore open research questions, such as the relative prices of retweets between people with different levels of popularity. Based on preliminary analysis, we find that prices of retweets remain within a small range even as popularity levels have much more variation. We also find that existing online friendship seems to be a strong factor in deciding who to trade with on Shout!. I explain the implications of our findings and outline our plans for future improvements to the platform.