Ask YC: Why do people share on social websites (like Youtube, Digg, Reddit, YC)?

In some discussion group we just settled, we were asked to write down what would be the most important for us in our lives. And to our big surprise 90% youngsters in the group used the words "recognition" or "social recognition". There wasn't any significant discussion before that could have biased this informal survey. It was surprising enough to catch my attention.

20 years later, here is how I explain this to myself. It is known for many years now that our brain has special centers responsible of fundamental drives in our behavior. These centers have been detected and localized by changes in people's behavior when altered by an accident or a disease. The drives are related to hunger, libido, aggressivity/love, etc.

Assuming that mankind is the product of an evolution driven by natural selection, the existence of such drive centers makes sense. It ensures perennity of our species from the biological and the physiological perspective. Maybe the social perspective did not get the same attention.

To me, the existence of a drive for social recognition would make sense because it pushes toward social coherence and cohesion and thus also to stability while being flexible enough to preserve the capability of our society to evolve and adapt to context changes.

This social recognition drive is thus equivalent to sexual drive, with all the possible related pathology. Social recognition compulsion can for instance lead to mythomania or eccentric behavior.

So my impression, if you allow me to push the logic to its extrema, social network sites are a variant of porn sites. They just tickle the brain centers driving our behavior.

I would thus say that social networking is directly related to the social recognition drive which is itself a component to get a stable dynamic system. If this is true, animals would show the same fundamental drive, and why not, ETs too.

Ditto. The level of discussion and topics of interest here are vastly better than what's available to me with my coworkers and people I bump into in real life. Can't speak for the YouTube community though.

I'm assuming people were able to choose more than one option. Check-boxes rather than radio buttons.

Yochai Benkler's book The Wealth of Networks talks about this at length. The whole text is available online but don't let that stop you from running out right now and buying a seminal work of our time.

Here's a passage you may find interesting:

"For a wide range of reasons - institutional, cultural, and possibly technological - some resources are more readily capable of being mobilized by social relations than by money. If you want to get your nephew a job at a law firm in the United States today, a friendly relationship with the firm's hiring partner is more likely to help than passing on an envelope full of cash. If this theory of social capital is correct, then sometimes you should be willing to trade off financial rewards for social capital. Critically, the two are not fungible or cumulative."

Benkler's argument is rather complex, so I urge people to read the chapter in full (if not the book) before gainsaying it.

http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php?title=Se...