Before, popularity could be described as a general sense of "people enjoy being around you". You could conceivably say that one person was more popular than another but that would be pretty subjective. Now it can be quantified directly in terms of number of followers or likes on a message.
I doubt people used to worry so much about whether they had 97 acquaintances who valued what they say vs having 102. Now those are very real worries for some people who regularly engage with social media and web forums.
- We have more community options that match our individual psychology. This means we can verify our self worth with lower risk of being labeled harshly (e.g. weird, toxic) or ignored (irrelevant input).
- We have more communication methods that allow a variety of psychological distances. You know that feeling when you accidentally start a video chat with your mom, even though you meant to text? The array of communications tools that even makes that feeling possible is actually a really clever new relationship-energy-saver. It allows you and mom (or whoever) to find a win-win communications setting more easily. This is likely to have positive ramifications for your sense of self worth, especially as a delta vs. "either you call my phone and do this my way, or we don't do this relationship". Everyone is invited, encouraged to be more flexible in communications.
- We have more tags and categories and subreddits and wikis than ever before. Discrete sets of these things can be viewed as patterns of identity, which means it is way more likely for someone to feel like they found a positive sense of their "worth" in the form of a set of those things that matches their past experience, i.e. who they are.
A few negative ways:
- A community or individual's stuff can be exposed all at once--hypertext and search give no assurance of linear access to anything. So some people will go digging through the garbage, even on themselves, without putting things into context. So direct access robs linear/big-picture context of some due credit.
- Likewise, if the in-door says "google me / my friend / that person," the out door says "wipe me off the net completely, here's my credit card." There's still a risk that direct access sends marginalized people running, screaming away from the net really fast. And that's a painful experience.
- And related, they may return as anonymous cowards, in which case they may come across real people, and get into worth-impacting conversations because they can't reveal their ID, maybe even end up being doxxed or just feeling frustrated that they're in this limbo-like zone.
Eh, not all great thoughts but some thoughts. :-)