My initial interpretation is that social debt is the antithesis of social capital and represents things like burning one's credibility, demonstrating untrustworthiness, losing respect, etc.

Some querying on the Internet shows people discussing social debt as a software engineering concept. In that context, it seems to be parallel to the idea of technical debt but revolves around the quality of the social dynamics of a team rather than the quality of the code.

In any case, it's definitionally not objectively measurable (and I'm not sure why that would be desirable), since it's about people's perceptions and subjective experiences with each other. One can, of course, subjectively measure it.

Think of it as negative goodwill. It is not objectively measured, in the same way that goodwill on balance sheets is not objectively measured.

But it’s a real thing. Qualitatively it is the impairment from people not wanting to do business with you. In Twitter’s case, that manifests as decreased advertiser demand, which results in lower ad prices.

And to the extent Twitter is losing MAU, that impacts ad inventory.

Goodwill on balance sheets is a technical thing and is quite different from common parlance "goodwill". It's the fudge factor introduced when doing an acquisition to make the numbers balance up correctly.

Yes — my point is that goodwill is intended to explain the difference between book value and purchase price. If something is “worth” $500, as evidenced by market cap, why pay $600? Because it’s worth $600 to you. That extra $100 is hand waved away as intangibles.

Maybe it wasn’t the best analogy. Was just looking for similar “it’s real but not precisely accounted for” concepts .

I thought "goodwill" was routinely assessed and considered in takeovers. It amounts to the goodwill of the customer base, doesn't it? I.e., how many customers are they, how much are they worth, and will the new owner get to keep them?

We certainly don’t know enough about psychology to objectively measure much of anything. But I suppose a massive portion of your workforce deciding to take severance instead of working for you any longer is one of the most concrete examples of high social debt coming and biting you in the ass I’ve ever heard of.

And in general that’s the idea of social debt. That every time you ask someone to change their responsibilities, or do something against company culture, or do something against their morals, or work longer hours for no extra pay, etc: you accrue negativity in their mind associated with you. Do that enough without there being positive things to “pay off” the debt and they’ll be less motivated to work for you, quit entirely, or even sabotage you.

Surely you don't think social debt can be objectively measured?

I never understood the premise behind questions like GP's, when they ask about something that's very obvious and intuitive for a person with any life experience. Maybe some of these comments are just about trying to be argumentative rather than asking honest questions.

> What is 'social debt' and how is it (objectively) measured?

ESG score (Environmental, Social and Governance), it isn't measured objectively but used as a tool for political control and for parading by activists.

You gotta do a lot of nice things before people will trust you or associate with you

Elon did two things: - he angered elites by changing the blue mark from status symbol to something else. - he angered the techies by firing people. These people have so much clout that doing sentiment analysis on his name before and after the twitter fiasco would probably have very interesting results.