What is social dominance?
An asset's share of the total crypto conversation - and the field the Moonboard Score is built around.
The definition
If an asset accounts for 300 of 10 000 posts across the covered market, its social dominance is 3 %. It is share of voice: not how much is being said, but how much of everything being said is about this asset.
Why share instead of count
Raw post counts move with the whole market. During a broad rally everything gets discussed more; during a quiet period everything gets discussed less. An asset's raw social volume can double while its position relative to the market is unchanged.
Social dominance removes that common factor. It isolates whether an asset is gaining attention relative to everything else, which is the question that usually matters.
The property that surprises people
Because dominance is a share, the shares must sum to 100 %. One asset's dominance can only rise if others' fall.
A rising social dominance can therefore mean the asset gained attention, or that the rest of the market lost it. Distinguishing the two requires the raw volume alongside the share. This is the same relativity that affects percentile-ranked metrics, arriving through a different route.
Against market dominance
The comparison that makes social dominance genuinely useful is against market dominance — the same share calculation applied to market capitalisation.
A ratio above 1 means an asset occupies more of the conversation than its market value would suggest. That is the definition of "discussed more than its size implies", and it is the concept the Moonboard Score is built around.
| Where the ratio enters | Contribution |
|---|---|
| Social buzz component | min(ratio × 5, 9) — up to 9 points |
| Discovery component | Step function — up to 15 points |
Up to 24 of the score's 100 points respond to this single quantity. That concentration is intentional — it is what the score is for — and it is worth knowing when reading a Moonboard Score as if it were a broad four-component composite.
What limits it
- It is a share of what was measured. The denominator is total collected social volume, so dominance expands and contracts with platform coverage as well as with attention.
- Small denominators are unstable. During quiet periods modest activity produces large dominance swings.
- Cheap to manipulate for small assets. Raising the numerator for an asset with a small baseline costs very little, and the ratio against market dominance amplifies the effect. See AI agents and synthetic activity.
- Ticker collisions inflate it persistently for assets with generic symbols, and no cross-sectional ranking removes an asset-specific bias.
Related
- Moonboard ScoreWhere this ratio does most of the work
- Social momentumAbsolute footprint rather than share
- Social intelligenceThe measurement problems in depth
- SMI methodologyWhere dominance is a minor term