
The Tragedy of the Commons - omarish
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Garrett_Hardin.27s_essay
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rfrey
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.

A better model for what you're talking about might be network effects -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effects>

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omarish
Hardin talks about the tragedy of the commons and relates it to the model of
sheep on a field.

 _Positive : the herder receives all of the proceeds from each additional
animal

_ Negative : the pasture is slightly degraded by each additional animal

This is very similar to the web 2.0 model on the internet today where
applications get smarter/stronger when people use them. Except on the web,
each additional user makes the overall web application stronger. A perfect
example is wikipedia itself.

When somebody publishes an article, it is a cost of 1. And then to a user
reading, he or she gets the benefit of N is the number of articles, but for
simplicity's sake, let's say the number of users.

Where do the negatives come in? Is there a "tragedy" in web 2.0?

