On net, this lowers your status.

I am growing ever more suspicious of this "status" term.

I'd prefer to resort to (linguistic) pragmatics. RNO made a straightforward and polite request. Then gwern granted the request but planted a subtle barb at the same time (roughly "You should have Googled it"). That was rude. We can only speculate on the reasons for being rude (e.g. past exchanges with RNO). Instead of acknowledging the rudeness and apologizing gracefully gwern is defending the initial behaviour. Both the rudeness and the defensiveness run counter to this site's norms. My prediction is further downvotes if this continues (and apparently gwern agrees!).

"Status", in this case, seems once again to be a non-load-bearing term.