Online status and identity: what to know and why

Every social service issues a currency. It is not money; it is standing, denominated in counts, marks and placements, and it can be spent only inside the service that issued it. Most of what people call online identity is the accumulated balance of this currency attached to a name, and most of what they call status is other people being able to see the balance.

This page describes the signals, what each one actually measures, why a persona and a person drift apart, and what happens when audiences that were supposed to stay separate meet.

What to take away

• Status signals are issued by the service, defined by the service, and worthless outside it. They measure what the service chose to count.
• A persona is a compression of a person for a particular audience. Every account is one, including the ones that claim not to be.
• The oldest online identity problem is not anonymity but context collapse: many audiences, one utterance, no way to address them separately.
• Nothing here states what any service's marks mean or how they are awarded, because those rules change without notice and the public understanding of them is usually out of date.

The signals, and what each one counts

Signal	What it looks like it measures	What it actually measures
A follower or friend count	How many people care what you say	How many accounts once pressed a button and never pressed it again, minus whatever the service removed, plus whatever was bought or automated
A verification or authority mark	That you are who you say, or that you matter	That you satisfied whatever the service's criteria were on the day, which may have been identity, prominence, payment or a mix, and which may have changed since
Placement in a feed or ranking	That your work is good	That the ranking system, whose rules are not published, predicted engagement from you at that moment
A reputation score or badge	Trustworthiness or expertise	Persistence and rule-compliance within one community, weighted by whatever that community's system rewards
An old or short handle	Early presence	Early presence, or purchase, or a recovered account; this is the one signal that is nearly honest and it can still be bought
Engagement counts on a post	Approval	Attention, which includes disagreement, mockery and automation

The pattern across the table is that every signal is a proxy, the proxy is defined by the issuer, and the issuer can and does change the definition. A count that meant one thing in one year means something else after a policy change nobody announced, and the history of the count is unrecoverable. The same fact defeats most attempts to build a timeline of these services.

Currency that cannot be exported

Standing earned in one service does not transfer. A large following on one service, a high reputation in one community, a long-standing handle: none of it is recognized anywhere else, and the person who built it starts again from nothing when they move.

This is not an accident. Non-portable status is the strongest reason a person stays on a service that has become worse for them, and every service knows it. The cost of leaving is not the lost content, which can usually be exported, but the lost standing, which cannot.

The consequence for anyone reading status signals is that they describe a position inside one economy. A person with no visible standing on one service may be central to another, and the size of a count says nothing about the size of the person.

Person and persona

Every account is a persona: a version of a person compressed for an audience. This is true of accounts under real names as much as accounts under invented ones, because a name is not the thing that makes a persona; selection is. Nobody posts everything. What they post is chosen for who they think is reading, and the chosen subset, seen from outside, is the identity.

The gap between the two grows with the audience. A small, known audience allows a persona close to the person, because the audience already knows the rest. A large, unknown audience forces the persona to be legible to strangers, which means simpler, more consistent and more performed. People with large audiences are not more fake than people with small ones; they are more compressed, because compression is what a large audience requires.

Pseudonymity, a stable invented name, is often treated as the opposite of authentic identity. It is closer to the opposite of context collapse: it lets one person hold different personas for different audiences without the audiences meeting. Most of the long-running communities described under internet communities were built on it, and their members were as accountable to each other as any real-named group, because the name had a history even if it was not the one on a passport.

When the audiences meet

Context collapse is the condition of speaking to many audiences at once with no way to address them separately. A remark meant for friends is read by an employer. A joke that depends on a community's shared history is read by someone with no history. A persona built for one audience is judged by another with different standards.

Offline, people manage this without thinking, by changing register as they move between rooms. Online, the rooms are merged, the utterance is permanent, and the audience for it includes people who have not arrived yet. The strategies people develop in response are familiar once named:

• Splitting. Multiple accounts, one per audience, which recreates the separate rooms at the cost of maintaining several personas.
• Flattening. One persona bland enough to be safe in front of every audience, which is what most professional accounts are.
• Encoding. Speaking in a register only the intended audience can read, using the community-specific vocabulary described under social media slang, so that outsiders see words but not meaning.
• Withdrawal. Posting less, or nothing, which is the most common strategy and the least visible, because the people doing it leave no trace.

The merged audience also includes the future. A remark is read years later by someone applying the standards of a different time, with none of the context, and the persona that made it may have moved on entirely. Identity online is not a snapshot but a record, and the record does not forget the versions you have discarded.

Status without consent

Standing can also be assigned to a person who did not ask for it. Someone becomes known for a single remark, a photograph or a moment, and the service's signals attach to that moment permanently. The count goes up; the person has no persona ready for the audience the count represents; and every response they make becomes new material for the audience. The mechanism is the one described under memes and virality, and the person's identity, as far as strangers are concerned, is the moment, for as long as search engines remember it.

The lesson is not that visibility is dangerous, though it can be. It is that the signals measure attention, attention is not approval, and the person under the signals may have chosen none of it.

Common questions

Does a large following mean a person is trusted?

It means many accounts followed at some point. Trust is a relationship, and a count is not one. The two correlate loosely at best, and the count can be bought.

Is using a real name more honest than a pseudonym?

A real name attaches a persona to a legal identity, which has consequences for accountability and for safety. It does not make the persona less selected. A pseudonym with a long history in one community is often more accountable to that community than a real name with none.

Why do people keep accounts on services they dislike?

Because standing does not transfer. The content can be exported; the audience and the reputation cannot. Leaving means starting from zero, and the service is designed so that this is expensive.

Should I try to keep my audiences separate?

That depends on what you say and to whom, and the honest answer is that the merged audience cannot be fully un-merged by anyone. Assume the widest audience is reading, or assume the cost of being read by them, and post accordingly.