"...Think about an email list: everyone can post freely to the list, but by doing so they consume readers' time. In a sense, there's a common pool of reading hours available, determined by the number of hours the average reader is willing to devote to mail from the list, multiplied by the number of readers. Each post to the list consumes some of that time, but at minimal cost to the poster in relation to the amount of time consumed. And the bigger the list, the greater the payoff (other people's time consumed) versus the cost (the poster's time).
Left to themselves, then, you'd expect that email lists and similarly-structured systems would succumb to a tragedy of the commons: excessive posting that consumes so much time that people abandon them and they die. (As a corollary, it would seem likely that the people whose time is the least valuable will post the most - since they incur the lowest cost in doing so - and if you assume that their time is less valuable because they're, well, dumb or crazy, then the more posts you see, the lower their likely value.) This does seem to describe the fate of many email listservs, which start out well, with a few members, flourish and grow for a time, but then degenerate into flamefests and collapse. A similar phenomenon seems to affect chatrooms, message boards, etc."
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