This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 19 Feb 2012, by Todd Suomela.
"And so on. So executive summary: one of the problems of a cheap communication high barrier to network world is that it creates incentives to two kinds of strategy which are market failure producing. One is the fake offer, which leads to the spam cycle, the other is the failure incentivized actor."
For the dating site, the basic problem is that the interests of the dating site, and the people on it, are 100% in opposition to each other. Daters want to find dates, dating sites want people to not find dates. This is a death spiral: the most desirable people for a dating site are cheaters – particularly men – because they stay on, they are more attractive than they should be – and picky women who are looking to boost their egos by rejecting men. For the same reason, they are more attractive than they should be, and are on more. They need just enough matches so that desperate people will join, but matches disappear.
Is there a solution for this? The physical world places an offer cost: a store, clothing and the time to get ready for a date, physically flying in a candidate or flying out an interviewer. The network world can impose a cost to, but of a different kind.
BTW, this applies to political activism. Activists are generally failures, because there is a huge incentive to be a failure. The activist proposition is to build up a network of people who are highly motivated by your cause, and give you money. This is a huge wall to climb. Once in place, it is easy to maintain. Hence failure is better, because a perpetual, unsolvable problem becomes legacy activism. Activists deserve being picked on, because the entrepreneurial model of activism has not served the people they get money from well, but it is far from an isolated case.
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