The tragedy of the commons would be people chewing up a limited resource in a way that prevents other people from doing better things with it.
What is the common resource that you think is being used up?
If it's the brainpower of the people writing SEO blogs, it doesn't prevent other people using their own brains.
If you think they are polluting the infosphere with crap, I can't really argue with that, but I can point out that it's generally ignorable and self-curing: when you don't make money at it, you stop.
So if anything, it resembles a late-stage ponzi where people aren't paying in much but are getting nothing back.
It is truly a tragedy of the commons. It makes sense for the individual to consume their content, they're not giving up much by themselves. The problem arises when everyone does it.
There are plenty of things that people “aren’t willing to pay for” on an individual level yet are overall beneficial for society at large. That’s why the tragedy of the commons is a concept.
The point is that unless you’re willing to pay people enough money and provide enough job security to create high-quality content, you will inevitably end up with advertising, attention-seeking, and subsidization as the main business models.
I know it isn't a direct comparison, but could this be the modern, Internet-equivalent of "tragedy of the commons"?
Instead of degradation through overuse (as with real-world resources, but meaningless in the context of Internet resources), we have degradation without meaningful contribution.
So many people and groups want to profit with as little effort as possible that the commons (freely available data, open APIs, FLOSS software, etc.) is being overrun with little to no regard for the long term effects.
Data can be copied endlessly, but it has to be generated the first time and updated or else it becomes stale and its usefulness decays. If no one is willing or able to generate or update it, there is nothing good and the signal-to-noise ratio falls off sharply. Everything is noise and it sucks.
"Tragedy of the commons"[1] doesn't seem to apply here.
That's applicable where (1) the free dumping of sewage into a common water supply or (2) advertisers get so good at making noisy attention-grabbing web ads that people have a strong motivation to start installing ad-blockers, making ad-based business models try and install more ad placements. It's similar to the Prisoner's Dilemna, where game theory has each player pitted against each other but the outcome is subject to a downward spiral of some common resource.
There is no downside for long-term property owners or the highly paid. If the well-paid engineers at tech companies were equally hurt by rising cost of living, then TotC might apply. They aren't, so it doesn't.
It's not a "tragedy of the commons", it's the failure of private businesses to monetise their operations without pissing people off so much they go and install special software to avoid it.
"Cooperation enables greater efficiency. You don't burn resources in efforts that exist just to harm your competitor. You get all of the economies of scale of sharing information, expertise, and technology."
Exactly if you consume or spoil all the resources you get Tragedy of the commons [1] "The tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource through their collective action."
Market players can self regulate and cooperate for the sake of common interest if not then it becomes zero sum game.
That's not a Tragedy of the Commons. Tragedy of the Commons is what happens when nobody clearly owns something that many people use, so none of them use it responsibly. That's not relevant at all to people hoarding their own wealth.
How is this "tragedy of the commons"? The only "common" they are using is the RF spectrum, which they are presumably not polluting too badly or the FCC would start smashing down doors.
Let's not start claiming the internet itself somehow qualifies as a "common", because with common ownership rationally comes common censorship (as with the FCC and public broadcasts).
To pick on a comment probably not meant as serious economics: It is most emphatically not a tragedy of the commons. We don't commonly own FT.com or share in its use. It is privately owned and thus a tragedy for FT's owners, if it significantly impacts their profits. Probably not.
Interesting. Almost like a tragedy of the commons - each individual is so "laser focused" on their own impact that it eventually leads to them plundering the cumulative value for users.
the tragedy of the commons is a thoroughly debunked though experiment, and actual studies show that in the real world, just like in this case, the real tragedy of the commons is when one entity (hashicorp) is able to monopolize a common good (open source software with contributions from tons of people outside of hashicorp) in a way everyone who was being a good user of the commons (by contributing back to those projects) is opposed to because it actively destroys something everyone was using collaboratively.
Hi, Omarish. The tragedy of the commons (economists call these situations "negative externalities") doesn't apply to Web 2.0 in my opinion.
The tragedy of the commons stems from a basic cost/benefit calculation: in business, if something costs you more than you make, you either stop selling it or you go out of business. The basic problem of a negative externality is that while the profit accrues to an individual, the cost hidden from that individual and is borne by the community. So a non-viable activity continues to be performed, until the community goes bankrupt. (I.e., the field is depleted and cannot sustain sheep). Some argue that pollution falls into this category. (Note that this is not necessarily an argument for private ownership of everything: the principle problem is costs exceeding benefits, and those costs being hidden from producers so that their incentives are misaligned. Privatization is one way, but probably not the only way, to align incentives.)
But in Web 2.0, there are no hidden costs that are depleting the overall store. Companies pay for their bandwidth, pay for their storage, etc. No costs are shifted to the community as near as I can tell.
> The tragedy of the commons is a phenomenon described in economics and ecology in which common resources, to which access is not regulated by formal rules or fees/taxes levied based on individual use, tend to become depleted
Okay but with remote work, what's the unregulated common resource being depleted or ruined?
What is the common resource that you think is being used up?
If it's the brainpower of the people writing SEO blogs, it doesn't prevent other people using their own brains.
If you think they are polluting the infosphere with crap, I can't really argue with that, but I can point out that it's generally ignorable and self-curing: when you don't make money at it, you stop.
So if anything, it resembles a late-stage ponzi where people aren't paying in much but are getting nothing back.
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