Love vs. fame products: A framework for social applications; by Li from Variant

Li argues that social apps should be classified along a spectrum from love (deepening connections with people you know) to fame (discovering creators and building reach), and that this split explains why mature networks like Instagram and X have shifted toward fame. Li says the ad-based business model rewards maximizing user attention, while love products tend to rely on subscriptions, and that X's 2023 redesign, which underweights the follower graph and gives Premium subscribers a ranking boost, marks a move from a love platform to a fame one. Li presents crypto as a way for smaller, love-based communities to fund themselves, citing Nouns DAO and FWB shared treasuries and Facebook's dropped group membership-fee pilot.