The Matthew Effect of Post-Twitter Social Networks

The Matthew Effect was first coined by sociologists Robert K. Merton and Harriet Zuckerman in 1968, who noticed that eminent scientists tended to get disproportionate credit for collaborative research compared to their less-well-known colleagues. 

The same paper would get more attention if a famous name was on it, even if their contribution was identical to a case where an unknown researcher did the work. 

In his analysis, Merton pointed to the Gospel of Matthew’s observation about the rich getting richer as a perfect encapsulation of how social systems tend to compound initial advantages.

This principle shows up everywhere once you start looking for it: bestseller lists drive more sales to already-bestselling books, wealthy people get better interest rates which helps them accumulate more wealth, and popular kids in school find it easier to make even more friends. Initial advantages don’t just add up — they multiply.

Which brings us to Bluesky’s “starter packs.” 

When you join the platform, you’re presented with curated lists of recommended accounts to follow. These aren’t randomly selected, nor are they purely based on current Bluesky engagement metrics. Instead, they’re heavily weighted toward what I’ll call the “Twitter Aristocracy” — influential users who built massive followings during Twitter’s 2015–2020 golden age.

Let’s break down who exactly makes up this aristocracy:

1. Tech journalists and commentators who rode the wave of Trump-era engagement
2. Early Web2.0 bloggers who successfully transitioned to Twitter
3. Startup founders and VCs who built personal brands during the unicorn boom
4. Cultural critics and essayists who mastered the art of the tweet thread
5. Various celebrities and their associated ecosystem of reply guys

These starter packs create a sort of digital primogeniture — the medieval practice where the firstborn son inherited everything. Except instead of land and titles, we’re passing down attention and influence. The same people who were best positioned to capture attention during Twitter’s key growth phase are now first in line to capture mindshare on Bluesky.

The curator system makes this even more pronounced. Bluesky gives enhanced powers to certain users to help shape these starter packs and influence discovery. And who gets to be curators? Well, largely the same people who already have significant influence. It’s like asking the aristocracy to decide who gets invited to court.

I can’t help seeing a historical parallel: just as medieval European society developed elaborate justifications for why the existing nobility deserved their position (divine right, superior breeding, noblesse oblige), we see similar post-hoc rationalizations in social media. “They must be good creators because they have large followings” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, much like “they must be fit to rule because they’re noble birth.”

The Good

From Bluesky’s perspective, this is absolutely brilliant product design.

1. New users face the “empty room problem” — signing up to a social network where you follow no one and no one follows you is about as exciting as showing up to an empty party. Starter packs solve this instantly.
2.  These established creators bring built-in quality. They’ve already proven they can consistently produce engaging content that keeps people coming back. They’re a known quantity.
3. Network effects are supercharged when high-profile users bring their existing audiences. Each celebrity account that migrates potentially brings thousands of active users with them.

The Bad

If this strategy is optimal for Bluesky as a platform, it’s less so for Bluesky creators. Why? It builds a new form of class-based inequality into the platform’s ecosystem.

The Matthew Effect here isn’t just about followers or engagement — it’s about the compound interest of social capital. 

Each year of being a major voice on Twitter provided:

• Practice at crafting viral content
• Connections with other influential users
• Understanding of emerging platform dynamics
• Access to exclusive features and beta tests
• Opportunities for press coverage and external validation
• The confidence that comes from proven success

When these advantages transfer to a new platform via starter packs, it’s not just the followers that transfer — it’s the entire accumulated arsenal of social capital. 

Whereas a new creator, even one with equal or superior raw talent, isn’t just starting from zero followers; they’re starting from zero everything.

This is why the Matthew Effect on social platforms is potentially even more powerful than the biblical version. It’s not just that the rich get richer — it’s that the rich get better at getting richer, while simultaneously making it harder for anyone else to get rich at all.

The better post-Twitter networks get at importing established creators, the tougher it becomes for new voices to break through.

Think about any writer starting fresh on Bluesky today.

They might produce content that’s objectively better than the established creators. But they’re facing:

1. An environment that naturally amplifies already-popular voices
2. A user base that has limited attention and has already allocated most of it
3. A platform culture increasingly dominated by established voices and their existing dynamics

It’s like trying to start a new restaurant in a city where every prime location is already occupied by a branch of an established chain, and the restaurant guide automatically recommends those chains to all new residents.

It’s a dynamic that is probably inescapable for any new social platform that wants to succeed. The starter pack strategy is too effective to ignore. Even if Bluesky wanted to prioritize new voices, they’d risk platform death by failing to solve the empty room problem quickly enough.

This tells me we’re looking at a deeper issue: the mechanisms that make post-Twitter social platforms successful may be fundamentally at odds with the goal of creating level playing fields for new voices.

So What Can Be Done?

A few potential solutions, none perfect:

• Deliberately feature new creators alongside established ones in starter packs.
• Actively identify and promote promising new voices with platform resources.
• Build discovery systems that boost high-quality content from lower-follower accounts.

But here’s the catch: any platform that implements these too aggressively risks losing to competitors who don’t. The harsh reality might be that this is simply the nature of attention markets.

“How do we fix this?” is a good question to ask. But so is, “What does this tell us about the nature of social platforms?” We might be witnessing an inevitable law of social media physics: the tendency of attention to concentrate into ever-denser clusters over time.

The good news? History suggests new platforms eventually emerge that reset the playing field. The bad news? By the time they do, their predecessors have usually become so calcified that the reset was necessary in the first place.

In the meantime, pour one out for all the brilliant voices you’ll never discover on Bluesky because they weren’t Twitter-famous five years ago.