In social contexts like the tech scene where applications like Face-book, Foursquare, Flickr, and Twitter are part of daily life, status is signaled using both emergent status signals and status affordances. On Twitter, follower count is the primary metric, somewhat to Evan Williams's discomfort. @replies and RTs began as informal ways to communicate on Twitter (and incidentally display access, connection, and status). These conventions, which became accepted more widely through their use by early adopters in the tech scene, were implemented by Twitter itself and integrated into the software, becoming status affordances.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 260