Jimmy Breeze's Library tagged complexity →  View Popular

Synthesis

This all seems to be brought together beautifully by the Guardian article, After social networks, what’s next?

In it, venture capitalist Peter Theil answers the question by asking us to evaluate what stage we’re at with social networks, and reminding us that we often don’t realize the implications of what we’re seeing even when it’s staring us right in the face.

Players could choose to reward or punish others at a small cost to themselves. Rand found that rewarding or punishing were equally likely to lead to cooperation and higher earnings, but when players had the option to either punish or reward, but chose to reward, they received higher absolute payoffs. "It becomes in one's self-interest to help the group," says Rand.

"It's sort of a 'you scratch the group's back and I'll scratch yours'," he says.

Money for nothing

Sam Bowles at the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico, cautions that Rand's game does not accurately reflect real economies. He points out, for example, that under Rand's rules the rewarder pays $4 and the rewardee "magically" receives $12. He calls this an unnatural scenario. "If you take away the free lunch, it doesn't work," says Bowles.

Rand points out that such disproportionate rewards often occur when we spend time, effort and money assisting people around us: helping a friend to move furniture, for instance, or recommending a colleague for promotion. Actions like these may have a smaller cost to us than the benefit they provide others. "These sorts of productive interactions are the building blocks of our society and should not be disregarded," he says.

"For a long time, the understood model for all kinds of large knowledge systems on the web was that they grow exponentially," he says. "The accepted explanation was that the rich get richer – things that receive a lot of attention end up getting a lot more attention."

Wikipedia fitted that model perfectly in its early days. However, when Chi and his colleagues looked at the recent data, they realised this approach did not fit any more.

Given the history of the online world – where escalating growth can continue for years – it seems unlikely that this gradual slowdown was inevitable. Instead, it could be the end result of a battle between two competing factions of Wikipedia editors.

On one side stand the deletionists, whose motto is "Wikipedia is not a junkyard"; on the other, the inclusionists, who argue that "Wikipedia is not paper".