This would seem to be what might be variously called a Tragedy of the Commons [1], a Multi-Polar Trap [2] or similarly the Prisoner's Dilemma, but at scale [3].
Obviously in the original Tragedy of the Commons, farmers with sheep grazing the common land, the tragedy was that if you didn't try to graze as many sheep as possible, someone else would and so you'd lose out, but because everyone was doing that the commons died out and everyone lost out.
(Disclaimer Generalisation) but that would seem to be what's happening here, "everyone" trying to maximise their utility just eats the system and it becomes unsustainable (be that content viewers trying to get content for free, Youtube trying to maximise revenue via maximal advertising, advertisers producing shit ads that I hope nobody ever acts on but then how else does money enter the system?, content creators and AI coders trying to make the best living).
Though unlike the original Tragedy of the Commons where everyone suffered equally, there's an interesting irony that the (content creators) who produce the most value (without which nothing else exists) have the least (individual?) power in the relationship probably "die" out first.
You could equally point to a similar situation in the music industry or any industry for that matter that doesn't have a strong enough or fast enough feedback loop to detect that the system is eating itself, but also have some ability to act on it.
As DanielS points out in the video below it's a coordination problem. If enough individuals in any of the groups defect from maximising their utility the system is stable. Be that content providers providing free content, advertisers giving free money without making you watch adverts, content viewers paying for content so no advertising needed, AI coders not producing a mechanism that summarises videos so people don't watch the videos and hence the adverts so no-one gets paid, <Youtube something>). You can extend this to coordination outside the system, you could argue this is why governments exist to provide a meta-framework that makes it illegal to do something that undermines the system, e.g. by having laws that prevent watching content for free.
You could also coordinate this at the meta level, if everyone involved in the problem got together and made sure that everyone was being looked after or say the content creators got together and collectively refused to provide any free content...
But obviously in the current system none of this is really possible, the more things change the more they stay the same, this would seem to be the price of progress, the same problems arising over and over just at increasing scales (and stakes). Just see the problem of musicians now back to square one because of streaming...
EDIT: The Prisoner's Dilemma isn't the best example here as prisoner's escaping jail despite doing a crime does have a negative societal impact, just I'm not aware of a better example from Game Theory?
TODO: Find a better explanation of Multi-Polar Traps that doesn't refer to Israel or Russia...
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.
The tragedy of the commons is not just any nonrational behaviour. It's a specific case where there is some property or resource held in common, and actors or agents can act to privatise gains whilst collectivising costs.
The classic case illustrated in Garret Hardin's 1968 essay is a common field, with a fixed carrying capacity, at that carrying capacity, in which one herdsman chooses to run yet more cattle. The total yield goes down, but the defector's yield increases. Since the gain is private and the loss is shared, the net incentive is to overgraze.
Calling the subscription spending market a commons seems a stretch. That's never a shared resource, it's always one which accrues to specific provider(s). Though the tendency is for it to accrue to a winner-takes-all provider.
And more crucially, there's no socialised loss here that I can see. There is a race-to-the-bottom dynamic possible with excessive competition, so long as offerings of one providers catalogue cannot be shared with others.
The problem instead seems to be simply one of falling marginal costs, such that the largest provider has the greatest efficiencies, and that with a sufficiently subdivided market (multiple subscription services), no one provider has a sufficient catalogue to sufficiently interest any one viewer, but the monetary and other costs (choice, selection, management) of multiple services is too high for any one subscriber to choose more than a small subset of services.
That's not a tragedy of the commons, it's a natural (network effects) monopoly situation.
(I'm aware you're not the original poster. I'd hoped they might respond.)
It's worse. In a typical tragedy of the commons scenario, common resource eventually get depleted and the responsible parties leave. Here, you can't really deplete the commons, you can only compete for the share in it. Which means there is no limit within the system for the negative feedback loop that occurs.
Advertisers play a zero-sum game, committing more and more resources to one-up each other. They're wasting ever increasing amount of fuel, minerals and man hours on epsilon marginal benefit. Those are real, tangible costs for society.
> 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 that resource through their collective action
The shared resource is the amount of money spent by consumers to watch content.
The individual users are content producers and aggregators.
It is in their self interest to own the last mile of content distribution, as they get more money this way than by licensing to others.
This action, collectively, spoils the shared resource by reducing the amount of money that consumers are willing to spend on watching content. They don't want to maintain multiple subscriptions to watch just one or two shows, or different series of the same show, and so maintain less subscriptions than if there was just one or two services with all the content.
"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.
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.
"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.
Can you explain how this would be a "tragedy of the commons"? I'm not sure I understand how there's a limited resource which each individual is incentivized to extract more than their sustainable share of.
Can you explain how this would be a "tragedy of the commons"? I'm not sure I understand how there's a limited resource which each individual is incentivized to extract more than their sustainable share of.
The "Tragedy of the Commons" is not the same thing as the "Free-Rider Problem" - in the former case, individual overuse is the issue, where in the latter (as in F/OSS) the problem is the failure to muster the necessary resources.
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 when there is a public good that, if most people contribute, everyone gets back more than they put in, but because it's rational for each person independently to not contribute (since it isn't strictly necessary for them in particular), it fails to happen.
Obviously in the original Tragedy of the Commons, farmers with sheep grazing the common land, the tragedy was that if you didn't try to graze as many sheep as possible, someone else would and so you'd lose out, but because everyone was doing that the commons died out and everyone lost out.
(Disclaimer Generalisation) but that would seem to be what's happening here, "everyone" trying to maximise their utility just eats the system and it becomes unsustainable (be that content viewers trying to get content for free, Youtube trying to maximise revenue via maximal advertising, advertisers producing shit ads that I hope nobody ever acts on but then how else does money enter the system?, content creators and AI coders trying to make the best living).
Though unlike the original Tragedy of the Commons where everyone suffered equally, there's an interesting irony that the (content creators) who produce the most value (without which nothing else exists) have the least (individual?) power in the relationship probably "die" out first.
You could equally point to a similar situation in the music industry or any industry for that matter that doesn't have a strong enough or fast enough feedback loop to detect that the system is eating itself, but also have some ability to act on it.
As DanielS points out in the video below it's a coordination problem. If enough individuals in any of the groups defect from maximising their utility the system is stable. Be that content providers providing free content, advertisers giving free money without making you watch adverts, content viewers paying for content so no advertising needed, AI coders not producing a mechanism that summarises videos so people don't watch the videos and hence the adverts so no-one gets paid, <Youtube something>). You can extend this to coordination outside the system, you could argue this is why governments exist to provide a meta-framework that makes it illegal to do something that undermines the system, e.g. by having laws that prevent watching content for free.
You could also coordinate this at the meta level, if everyone involved in the problem got together and made sure that everyone was being looked after or say the content creators got together and collectively refused to provide any free content...
But obviously in the current system none of this is really possible, the more things change the more they stay the same, this would seem to be the price of progress, the same problems arising over and over just at increasing scales (and stakes). Just see the problem of musicians now back to square one because of streaming...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEcLXqwZJQw
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma
EDIT: The Prisoner's Dilemma isn't the best example here as prisoner's escaping jail despite doing a crime does have a negative societal impact, just I'm not aware of a better example from Game Theory?
TODO: Find a better explanation of Multi-Polar Traps that doesn't refer to Israel or Russia...
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