I wouldn't call it tragedy of the commons, because it's not a commons. It's owned by microsoft. They're calculating that it's worth it for them, so I say take as much as you can.
Commons would be if it's owned by nobody and everyone benefits from its existence.
> so I say take as much as you can. Commons would be if it’s owned by nobody
This isn’t what “commons” means in the term ‘tragedy of the commons’, and the obvious end result of your suggestion to take as much as you can is to cause the loss of access.
Anything that is free to use is a commons, regardless of ownership, and when some people use too much, everyone loses access.
Finite digital resources like bandwidth and database sizes within companies are even listed as examples in the Wikipedia article on Tragedy of the Commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
No, the word and its meaning both point to the fact that there’s no exclusive ownership of a commons. This is importantl, since ownership is associated with bearing the cost of usage (i.e., deprecation) which would lead an owner to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Ownership is regularly the solution to the tragedy (socialism didn’t work).
The behavior that you warn against is that of a free rider that make use of a positive externality of GitHub’s offering.
That is one meaning of “commons”, but not all of them, and you might be mistaking which one the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ is using.
“Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.”
The actual mechanism by which ownership resolves tragedy of the commons scenarios is by making the resource non-free, by either charging, regulating, or limiting access. The effect still occurs when something is owned but free, and its name is still ‘tragedy of the commons’, even when the resource in question is owned by private interests.
Ownership, I guess. The 2 parent comments are claiming that “tragedy of the commons” doesn’t apply to privately owned things. I’m suggesting that it does.
Edit: oh, I do see what you mean, and yes I misunderstood the quote I pulled from WP - it’s talking about non-ownership. I could pick a better example, but I think that’s distracting from the fact that ‘tragedy of the commons’ is a term that today doesn’t depend on the definition of the word ‘commons’. It’s my mistake to have gotten into any debate about what “commons” means, I’m only saying today’s usage and meaning of the phrase doesn’t depend on that definition, it’s a broader economic concept.
What’s not what? Care to back up your argument with any links? I already pointed out that examples in the WP article for ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ use private property. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Digital... Are you contradicting the Wikipedia article? Why, and on what basis?
I'm contradicting your interpretation of the Wikipedia article. It does not support your initial statement that a) Github's (or any other company's) free tier constitutes a commons and/or b) the "overuse" of said free tiers by free riders could be the base of a tragedy of the commons (ToC). The idea is absurd, since there is no commons and also no tragedy. To the contrary. Commons have an external or natural limit to how much they can provide in a given time without incurring cost in the form of depreciation. But there is no external or natural limit to the free tier. The free tier is the result of the incentives under which the Github management operates and it is fully at their discretion, so the limits are purely internal. Other than in the case of commons, more usage can actually increase the amount of resources provided by the company for the users of the free tier, because a) network effects and b) economies of scale (more users bring more other users; more users cost less per user).
If Github realizes that the free tier is too generous, they can cut it anytime without it being in any way a "tragedy" for anybody involved - having to pay for stuff or service you want to consume is not the "T" in ToC! The T is that there are no incentives to pay (or use less) without increasing the incentives for everyone else to just increase their relative use! You not using the github free tier doesn't increase the usage of Github for anybody else - if it has any effect at all, it might actually decrease the usage of Github because you might not publish something that might in turn attract other users to interact.
Wikipedia does use Wikipedia, a privately owned organization, as an example of a digital commons.
The ‘tragedy’ that the top comment referred to is losing unlimited access to some of GitHub’s features, as described in the article (shallow clones, CPU limits, API rate limits, etc.). The finiteness, or natural limit, does exist in the form of bandwidth, storage capacity, server CPU capacity, etc.. The Wikipedia article goes through that, so I’m left with the impression you didn’t understand it.
> Wikipedia does use Wikipedia, a privately owned organization
The Wikimedia organization does not actually own wikipedia. They do not control editorial policy nor own the copyright of any of the contents. They do not pay any of the editors.
It is really annoying that you're shifting the goal post by bringing up Wikipedia (as an example, not the article), which is very much different from Github in many ways. Still, Wikipedia is not a common good in my book, but at least in the case of Wikipedia I can understand the reasoning and it's a much more interesting case.
But let's stick with Github. On which of the following statements can we agree?
Z1) A "Commons" is a system of interacting market participants, governed by shared interests and incentives (and sometimes shared ownership). Github, a multi billion subsidiary of the multi trillion dollar company Microsoft, and I, their customer, are not members of the same commons; we don't share many interests, we have vastly different incentives, and we certainly do not share any ownership. We have a legally binding contract that each side can cancel within the boundaries of said contract under the applicable law.
Z2) A tragedy in the sense of the Tragedy of the Commons is that something bad happens even though everyone can have the best intentions, because the system lacks a mechanism would allow to a) coordinate interests and incentives across time, and b) to reward sustainable behavior instead of punishing it.
A) Github giving away stuff for free while covering the cost does not constitute a common good from...
1. a legal perspective
2. an ethical perspective
3. an economic perspective
B) If a free tier is successful, a profit maximizing company with a market penetration far from saturation will increase the resources provided in total, while there is no such mechanism or incentive for any participant in a market involving a common good, e.g. there will be no one providing additional pasture for free if an Allmende is already destroying the existing pasture through overgrazing.
C) If a free tier is unsuccessful because it costs more than it enables in new revenue, a company can simply shut it down – no tragedy involved. No server has been depreciated, no software destroyed, no user lost their share of a commonly owned good.
D) More users of a free tier reduce net loss / increase net earnings per free user for the provider, while more cattle grazing on a pasture decrease net earnings / increase net loss per cow.
E) If I use less of Github, you don't have any incentive to use more of it. This is the opposite of a commons, where one participant taking less of it puts out an incentive to everybody else to take their place and take more of it.
F) A service that you pay for with your data, your attention, your personal or company brand and reach (e.g. with public repositories), is not really free.
G) The tiny product samples that you can get for free in perfume shops do not constitute a common good, even though they are limited, "free" for the user, and presumably beneficial even for people not involved in the transaction. If you think they were a common good, what about Nestlé offering Cheerios with +25% more for free? Are those 20% a common good just because they are free? Where do you draw the line? Paying with data, attention, and brand + reach is fine, but paying for only 80% of the produce is not fine?
H) The concepts of "moral hazard" and "free riders" apply to all your examples, both Github and Wikipedia. The concept of a Commons (capital C) is neither necessary nor helpful in describing the problems that you want to describe wrt to free services provided by either Github of Wikipedia.
Nope, no goal posts were moved, Wikipedia and GitHub are both private entities that offer privately funded free services to everyone, and due to the widespread free access, both have been considered to be examples of digital commons by others. I didn’t make up the Wikipedia example, it’s in Wikipedia being offered as one of the canonical examples of digital commons, and unfortunately for you it pokes a hole in your argument. If your ‘book’ disagrees with the WP article, you’re free to fix it (since WP is a digital commons), and you’re also free to use it to re-evaluate whether your book needs updating.
You seem to be stuck on definitions of ‘commons’, and unfortunately that’s not a compelling argument for reasons I’ve already stated. Also unfortunate that there are fundamental terminology flaws, or made up definitions, or straw men arguments, or incorrect statements, or opinions in every single item you listed.
“Tragedy of the Commons” is a phrase that became an economic term of art a long time ago. It’s now an abstract concept, and gets used to mean (as well as defined by) any situation in which a community of people overusing shared resources causes any loss of access to those shared resources for anyone else in the community. “The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory claiming that individuals tend to exploit shared resources so that demand outweighs supply, and it becomes unavailable for the whole.” (Investopedia) I’ve already cited multiple sources that define it that way, and so far you’ve shared no evidence to the contrary.
There are also tons of examples online where the phrase has been used to refer to small, local, or privatized resources, I found a dozen in like one minute, so I already know it’s incorrect to claim that people don’t use the phrase in the way I’m suggesting.
Even though the phrase does not depend on any strict definition of commons (or of tragedy), none of your argument addresses the fact that what’s common in, say, Germany is not freely available to Iranians, for example. Land is often used in ‘tragedy of the commons’ examples. Hardin’s original example was sheep grazing on “public” land, and yet there is really no such thing as common land anywhere on this planet, all of it is claimed by subgroups, e.g., countries, and is private is some sense. The idea of commons, and even some of the alternate dictionary definitions, make explicit note that the word is relative to a specific community of people. Nothing you’ve said addresses that fact, and it means that ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ has always referred to resources that are not common in a global context. GitHub and Wikipedia are more common than “public” land in America in that global sense, because they’re used by and available to more people than US land is.
What I can agree with is that it’s common for people to mean things like land, air, and water, when using or referring to the phrase, and I agree those things count as commons.
You're confusing public goods with common goods. That's your personal tragedy of the commons.
> “The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory claiming that individuals tend to exploit shared resources so that demand outweighs supply, and it becomes unavailable for the whole.” (Investopedia)
EXACTLY. This is NOT what is happening in the case of Github. As explained plenty of times, Github has the incentive to INCREASE their supply, making MORE available for the whole, if the whole demands MORE. Also, they are a centralized, coordinated entity, that can change the rules for the whole flock, which is one of the famous coordination problems associated with common goods. They can also discriminate between their contractual partners and optimize for multi-period results for reducing moral hazards and free-riding. It must be stupidity to not see these fundamental difference on the systems level.
> I didn’t make up the Wikipedia example, it’s in Wikipedia being offered as one of the canonical examples of digital commons
Yeah, the example in the article is Wikipedia, not Github. That's your example. All my statements refer to 100% to Github and probably only 90% to Wikipedia. That said, there are true digital commons, e.g. the copper cables connecting the houses in your street. Unsufficient number of bands in old wifi standards.
Since Dunning-Kruger has entered the chat, I'm going to leave. Have a good day; you will have a hard time having serious conversations if you do not accept that it helps everyone to favor precise language over watering down the meaning of concepts, like some social scientists and journalists seem to prefer for self-marketing purposes.
> You’re confusing public goods with common goods.
Am I? Where did I do that? The distinction between common and public is defined as whether or not the thing can succumb to tragedy of the commons. If public goods are “non-rivalrous”, then land is not a public good, it’s a common good, right? And “common” land is owned by nation states, or by smaller geographic communities, is it not? Therefore, ownership is always involved and the land is not available for use by people from other nation states, right?
Above, you said “there’s no exclusive ownership of a commons”. But sheep grazing on “commons” land is generally land owned exclusively by a country, nation, state, province, city, etc.. I assume what you meant was that no one person or sub-group within the geographical community owns the commons.
> This is NOT what is happening in the case of GitHub.
That’s not true, the article we’re commenting on gave examples of at least three different specific things that GitHub has limited in response to overuse, and the comment that started this thread was reacting to that fact. If they have incentive to increase their supply, why didn’t they actually do it? Logic can’t override history.
> there are true digital commons, e.g. the copper cables connecting the houses in your street
That’s not true, that’s not a commons at all, and not what the phrase “digital commons” means. In the US, the cables are owned by the telcom providers that installed them, they are private property. Maybe there are public cables where you live, but in that case, it seems like maybe you are the one confusing public and common goods. The phrase ‘digital commons’ generally speaking refers to digital goods, not physical goods. (But there is some leakage into the physical world, which is why some digital commons are susceptible to the tragedy of the commons.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_commons (Do note that GitHub is listed there as an example of a digital commons.)
> It must be stupidity to not see these fundamental difference on the systems level
FWIW, you’ve flatly broken HN guidelines here, and this reflects extremely poorly on you and your argument. From my point of view, I can only interpret this lack of civility to mean you you’re frustrated about not being able to answer my questions or form a convincing argument.
GP shouldn't have said something insulting, but I do think it's you who are being obtuse here in not acknowledging that this is at least very different than the field everyone can graze on that gets overgrazed, that is the most simple and widely-accepted type of commons. It's probably not worth arguing semantics at all ("is this a commons?") because there isn't a "Tragedy of the Commons" central authority that could ever adjudicate that. Any definition of commons could be used; the only thing that matters is if the definitions are useful to define what's going on and to compare it to other situations.
In this case, GitHub can very cheaply add enforceable rules and force heavy users to consume only what they consider a tolerable amount of resources. The majority who don't need an outsized amount of resources will never be affected by this. That is why there is no 'tragedy' here.
It would be as if the grazing field were outfitted with sheep-facial-recognition and could automatically and at trivial cost, gently drone-airlift any sheep outside the field after they consume 3x what a normal sheep eats each day. In what most of us think of as a ToC situation, there is little that can be done besides closing the field or subdividing it into tiny, private plots which are policed.
The singular point of debate here from my side has been whether the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ applies to cases where the ‘commons’ are owned to the exclusion of some people, and nothing else. I don’t believe I have failed to acknowledge the differences between physical and digital commons, but let me correct that impression now: GitHub certainly is very different from a sheep-grazing field in almost every way. GitHub is even different from Wikipedia in many ways, just like GP said. I am arguing those differences, no matter how large, do not matter purely in terms of whether you can call these a ‘commons’, and I’ve supported that opinion by showing evidence that other people call both GitHub and Wikipedia a ‘digital commons’. If any definition of commons can be used, including privately owned land that is made available to the public, then I think you and I agree completely. The Wikipedia article about this phrase actually points out what I’ve been saying here, that common land does not exist.
There is a central authority on this topic: the paper by Hardin that coined the phrase. It’s worth a read. He defined ‘tragedy’ to be in the dramatic sense, e.g., a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy: “We may well call it ‘the tragedy of the commons,’ using the word ‘tragedy’ as the philosopher Whitehead used it: ‘The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorse-less working of things.’”
Hardin did not define ‘commons’, but he used multiple examples of things that are owned to the exclusion of others, and he even pointed out that a bank robber thinks of a bank as a commons. He himself blurred the line of what a commons means, and his actual argument depends only on the idea that commons means something shared and nothing more. In fact, he was making a point about human behavior, and his argument is stronger when ‘commons’ refers to any shared resources that can be exhausted by overuse at all. Hardin would have had a good chuckle over this extremely silly debate.
The actual points Hardin was making behind his phrase ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ were that Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ economics, and Libertarian thinking, are provably wrong, and that we should abolish the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically the right to breed freely, because he believes these things will certainly lead to overpopulation of the earth and thus increased human suffering. The only actual ‘commons’ he truly cared about in this paper is the earth’s space and food supply. The question of ownership is wholly and utterly irrelevant to his phrase.
GitHub adding rules that curtails people does limit some people’s access, that’s the point. How many people it affects I don’t know, and I don’t think it’s especially relevant, but note that in this case one single GitHub user being limited might affect many many people - Homebrew was one of the examples.
“Tragedy” never referred to the magnitude of the problem, as you and GP are assuming. Hardin’s “tragedy” refers to the human character flaw of thinking that shared things are preferable to limitations, because he argues that we end up with uncontrolled (worse) limitations anyway. His “tragedy” is the inevitability of loss, the irony of misguided belief in the very idea of a commons.
I'm not sure i agree that the Wikipedia article supports your position.
Certainly private property is involved in tragedy of the commons. In the classic shared cattle ranching example, the individual cattle are private property, only the field is held in common.
I generally think that tragedy of the commons requires the commons, to, well, be held in common. If someone owns the thing that is the commons, its not a commons but just a bad product. (With of course some nit picking about how things can be de jure private property while being defacto common property)
In the microsoft example, windows becoming shitty software is not a tragedy of the commons, its just MS making a business decision because windows is not a commons. On the other hand, computing in general becoming shitty, because each individual app does attention grabbing dark patterns, as it helps the induvidual apps bottom line while hurting the ecosystem as a whole, would be a tragedy of the commons, as user attention is something all apps hold in common and none of them own.
One of the examples of digital commons in the article is Wikipedia itself, which is privately owned, so now you can be sure the Wikipedia article does backup my claim at least a little.
The Microsoft example in this subthread is GitHub, not Windows. Windows is not a digital commons, because it’s neither free nor finite. Github is (or was) both. That is the criteria that Wikipedia is using to apply the descriptor ‘commons’: something that is both freely available to the public, and comes in limited supply, e.g. bandwidth, storage, databases, compute, etc.
Wikipedia’s article seems to be careful to not discuss ownership nor define the tragedy of the commons in terms of ownership, presumably because the phrase describes something that can still happen when privately owned things are made freely available. I skimmed Investopedia’s article on Tragedy as well, and it seems similarly to not explicitly discuss ownership, and even brings up the complicated issue of lack of international commons. That’s an interesting point: whatever we call commons locally may not be a commons globally. That suggests that even the original classic notion of tragedy of the commons often involves a type of private ownership, i.e. overfishing a “public” lake is a lake owned by a specific country, cattle overusing a “public” pasture is land owned by a specific country, and these resources might not be truly common when considered globally.
What use of GitHub are you talking about? The use of GitHub by @c-linkage at the top of the thread was, in fact, based on GitHub being free to use. And GitHub’s basic services are free to use. I really don’t know what you mean.
Your oft-repeated customer vs product platitude doesn’t seem to apply to GitHub, at least not to it’s founding and core product offering. You are the customer, and GitHub doesn’t advertise. It’s a freemium model, the free access is just a sort of loss leader to entice paid upgrades by you, the customer.
Still, because reality doesn't respect boundaries of human-made categories, and because people never define their categories exhaustively, we can safely assume that something almost-but-not-quite like a commons, is subject to an almost-but-not-quite tragedy of the commons.
That seems to assume some sort of… maybe unfounded linearity or something? I mean, I’m not sure I agree that GitHub is nearly a commons in any sense, but let’s put that aside as a distraction…
The idea of the tragedy of the commons relies on this feedback loop of having these unsustainably growing herds (growing because they can exploit the zero-cost-to-them resources of the commons). Feedback loops are notoriously sensitive to small parameter changes. MS could presumably impose some damping if they wanted.
> That seems to assume some sort of… maybe unfounded linearity or something
Not linearity but continuity, which I think is a well-founded assumption, given that it's our categorization that simplifies the world by drawing sharp boundaries where no such bounds exist in nature.
> The idea of the tragedy of the commons relies on this feedback loop of having these unsustainably growing herds (growing because they can exploit the zero-cost-to-them resources of the commons)
AIUI, zero-cost is not a necessary condition, a positive return is enough. Fishermen still need to buy fuel and nets and pay off loans for the boats, but as long as their expected profit is greater than that, they'll still overfish and deplete the pond, unless stronger external feedback is introduced.
Given that the solution to tragedy of the commons is having the commons owned by someone who can boss the users around, GitHub being owned by MS makes it more of a commons in practice, not less.
No, it’s not a well-founded assumption. Many categories like these were created in the first place because there is a very obvious discontinuous step change in behavior.
You’re fundamentally misunderstanding what tragedy of the commons is. It’s not that it’s “zero-cost” for the participants. All it requires a positive return that has a negative externality that eventually leads to the collapse of the system.
Overfishing and CO2 emissions are very clearly a tragedy of the commons.
GitHub right now is not. People putting all sorts of crap on there is not hurting github. GitHub is not going to collapse if people keep using it unbounded.
Not surprisingly, this is because it’s not a commons and Microsoft oversees it, placing appropriate rate limits and whatnot to make sure it keeps making sense as a business.
And indeed MS/GitHub does impose some "damping" in the form of things like API request throttling, CPU limits on CI, asking Homebrew not to use shallow cloning, etc. And those limits are one of the reasons given why using git as a database isn't good.
There is an analogy in the sense that for the users a resource is, for certain practical intents and purposes, functionally common. Social media is like this as well.
But I would make the following clarifications:
1. A private entity is still the steward of the resource and therefore the resource figures into the aims, goals, and constraints of the private entity.
2. The common good is itself under the stewardship of the state, as its function is guardian of the common good.
3. The common good is the default (by natural law) and prior to the private good. The latter is instituted in positive law for the sake of the former by, e.g., reducing conflict over goods.
> There is an analogy in the sense that for the users a resource is, for certain practical intents and purposes, functionally common. Social media is like this as well.
I think it's both simpler and deeper than that.
Governments and corporations don't exist in nature. Those are just human constructs, mutually-recursive shared beliefs that emulate agents following some rules, as long as you don't think too hard about this.
"Tragedy of the commons" is a general coordination problem. The name itself might've been coined with some specific scenarios in mind, but for the phenomenon itself, it doesn't matter what kind of entities exploit the "commons"; the "private" vs. "public" distinction itself is neither a sharp divide, nor does it exist in nature. All that matters is that there's some resource used by several independent parties, and each of them finds it more beneficial to defect than to cooperate.
In a way, it's basically a 3+-player prisonner's dilemma. The solution is the same, too: introducing a party that forces all other parties to cooperate. That can be a private or public or any other kind of org taking ownership of the commons and enforcing quotas, or in case of prisonners, a mob boss ready to shoot anyone who defects.
It was not my intent to be exhaustive, but to make a few points that left it up to the reader to relate them appropriately to your post in order to enrich thinking about the subject.
But it appears we cannot avoid getting into the weeds a bit…
> Governments and corporations don't exist in nature.
This is not as simple as you seem to think.
The claim “don’t exist in nature” is vague, because the word “nature” in common speech is vague. What is “natural”? Is a beehive “natural” Is a house “natural”? Is synthetic water “natural”? (I claim that the concept of “nature” concerns what it means to be some kind of thing. Perhaps polystyrene has never existed before human beings synthesized it, but it has a nature, that is, it means something to be polystyrene. And it is in the nature of human beings to make materials and artifacts, i.e., to produce technology ordered toward the human good.)
So, what is government? Well, it is an authority whose central purpose is to function as the guardian and steward of the common good. I claim that parenthood is the primordial form of human government and the family as the primordial form of the state. We are intrinsically social and political animals; legitimate societies exist only when joined by a common good. This is real and part of human nature. The capacity to deviate from human nature does not disprove the norm inherent to it.
Now, procedurally we could institute various particular and concrete arrangements through which government is actualized. We could institute a republican form of government or a monarchy, for example. These are historically conditioned. But in all cases, there is a government. Government qua government is not some arbitrary “construct”, but something proper to all forms and levels of human society.
> "Tragedy of the commons" is a general coordination problem.
We can talk about coordination once we establish the ends for which such coordination is needed, but there is something more fundamental that must be said about the framing of the problem of the “tragedy”. The framing does not presume a notion of human beings as moral agents and political and social creatures. In other words, it begins with a highly individualist, homo economicus view of human nature as rationally egoist and oriented toward maximizing utility, full stop. But I claim that is not in accord with human nature and thus the human good, even if people can fall into such pathological patterns of behavior (especially in a culture that routinely reinforces that norm).
As I wrote, human beings are inherently social animals. We cannot flourish outside of societies. A commons that suffers this sort of unhinged extraction is an example of a moral and a political failure. Why? Because it is unjust, intemperate, and a lack of solidarity to maximize resource extraction in that manner. So the tragedy is a matter of a) the moral failure of the users of that resource, and b) the failure of an authority to regulate its use. The typical solution that’s proposed is either privatization or centralization, but both solutions presuppose the false anthropology of homo economicus. (I am not claiming that privatization does not have a place, only that the dichotomy is false.)
Now, I did say that the case with something like github is analogical, because functionally, it is like a common resource, just like how social media functions like a public square in some respects. But analogy is not univocity. Github is not strictly speaking a common good, nor is social media strictly a public square, because in both cases, a private company manages them. And typically, private goods are managed for private benefit, even if they are morally bound not to harm the common good.
That intent, that purpose, is central to determining whether something is public or private, because something public has the common benefit as its aim, while something private has private benefit as its aim.
The whole notion of the "tragedy of the commons" needs to be put to rest. It's an armchair thought experiment that was disproven at the latest in the 90s by Elinor Ostrom with actual empirical evidence of commons.
The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea.
A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms. The classic examples like people grazing sheep or cutting wood are bad examples that don't really work.
But that doesn't mean the tragedy of the commons can't happen in other scenarios. If we define commons a bit more generously it does happen very frequently on the internet. It's also not difficult to find cases of it happening in larger cities, or in environments where cutthroat behavior has been normalized
> A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms.
That works while the size of the community is ~100-200 people, when everyone knows everyone else personally. It breaks down rapidly after that. We compensate for that with hierarchies of governance, which give rise to written laws and bureaucracy.
New tribes break off old tribes, form alliances, which form larger alliances, and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase.
This is sociopolitical history of the world in a nutshell.
"and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase."
You say it like this is a law set in stone, because this is what happened im history, but I would argue it happened under different conditions.
Mainly, the main advantage of an empire over small villages/tribes is not at all that they have more power than the villages combined, but that they can concentrate their power where it is needed. One village did not stand a chance against the empire - and the villages were not coordinated enough.
But today we would have the internet for better communication and coordination, enabling the small entieties to coordinate a defense.
Well, in theory of course. Because we do not really have autonomous small states, but are dominated by the big players. And the small states have mowtly the choice which block to align with, or get crushed. But the trend might go towards small again.
(See also cheap drones destroying expensive tanks, battleships etc.)
Internet is working exactly the opposite way to what your describing - it's making everything more centralized.
Once we had several big media companies in each country and in each big city. Now we have Google and Facebook and tik tok and twitter and then the "whatevers".
Yes, but there is a difference between having the choice of joining FB or not having a choice at all when the empire comes to claim you (like in Ukraine).
FB is part of the empire though, and it is coming for us.
canadians need an anti-imperial radio-canada run alternative. we arent gonna be able to coordinate against the empire when the empire has the main control over the internet.
when the americans come a knocking, we're gonna wish we had chinese radios
> That works while the size of the community is ~100-200 people,
Yet we regularly observe that working with millions of people; we take care of our young, we organize, when we see that some action hurt our environment we tend to limit its use.
It's not obvious why some societies break down early and some go on working.
> Yet we regularly observe that working with millions of people; we take care of our young, we organize, when we see that some action hurt our environment we tend to limit its use.
That's more like human universals. These behaviors generally manifest to smaller or larger degree, depending on how secure people feel. But those are extremely local behaviors. And in fact, one of them is exactly the thing I'm talking about:
> we organize
We organize. We organize for many reasons, "general living" is the main one but we're mostly born into it today (few got the chance to be among the founding people of a new village, city or country). But the same patterns show up in every other organizations people create, from companies to charities, from political interests groups to rural housewives' circles -- groups that grow past ~100 people split up. Sometimes into independent groups, sometimes into levels of hierarchies. Observe how companies have regional HQs and departments and areas and teams; religious groups have circuits and congregations, etc. Independent organizations end up creating joint ventures and partnerships, or merge together (and immediately split into a more complex internal structure).
The key factor here is, IMO, for everyone in a given group to be in regular contact with everyone else. Humans are well evolved for living in such small groups - we come with built-in hardware and software to navigate complex interpersonal situations. Alignment around shared goals and implicit rules is natural at this scale. There's no space for cheaters and free-loaders to thrive, because everyone knows everyone else - including the cheater and their victims. However, once the group crosses this "we're all a big family, in it together" size, coordinating everyone becomes hard, and free-loaders proliferate. That's where explicit laws come into play.
This pattern repeats daily, in organizations people create even today.
I get the feeling it's the combination of Schelling points and surplus. If everyone else is being pro-social, i.e. there is a culture of it, and the people aren't so hard up that they can reasonably afford to do the same, then that's what happens, either by itself (Hofstadter's theory of superrationality) or via anything so much as light social pressure.
But if a significant fraction of the population is barely scraping by then they're not willing to be "good" if it means not making ends meet, and when other people see widespread defection, they start to feel like they're the only one holding up their end of the deal and then the whole thing collapses.
This is why the tendency for people to propose rent-seeking middlemen as a "solution" to the tragedy of the commons is such a diabolical scourge. It extracts the surplus that would allow things to work more efficiently in their absence.
I’ve heard stories from communist villages where everyone knew everyone. Communal parks and property was not respected and frequently vandalized or otherwise neglected because it didn’t have an owner and it was treated as something for someone else to solve.
It’s easier to explain in those terms than assumptions about how things work in a tribe.
Even here, the state is the steward of the common good. It is a mistaken notion that the state only exists because people are bad. Even if people were perfectly conscientious and concerned about the common good, you still need a steward. It simply wouldn’t be a steward who would need to use aggressive means to protect the common good from malice or abuse.
> A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario.
No it does not. This sentiment, which many people have, is based on a fictional and idealistic notion of what small communities are like having never lived in such communities.
Empirically, even in high-trust small villages and hamlets where everyone knows everyone, the same incentives exist and the same outcomes happen. Every single time. I lived in several and I can't think of a counter-example. People are highly adaptive to these situations and their basic nature doesn't change because of them.
While an earlier poster is over stating Ostrom’s Nobel prize winning work — it is regularly shown that averting the tragedy of the commons is not as insurmountable as the original coining of the phrase implied.
Ostrom showed that it wasn't necessarily a tragedy, if tight groups involved decided to cooperate. This common in what we call "trust-based societies", which aren't universal.
Nonetheless, the concept is still alive, and anthropic global warming is here to remind you about this.
She not “disprove” the existence of the tragedy of the commons. What she established was that controlling the commons can be done communally rather than through privatization or through government ownership.
Communal management of a resource is still government, though. It just isn’t central government.
The thesis of the tragedy of the commons is that an uncontrolled resource will be abused. The answer is governance at some level, whether individual, collective, or government ownership.
> The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea.
Right. And that’s what people are usually talking about when they say “tragedy of the commons”.
People invoke the tragedy of the commons in bad faith to argue for privatization because “the alternative is communism”. i.e. Either an individual or the government has to own the resource.
This is of course a false dichotomy because governance can be done at any level.
It also seems to omit the possibility that the thing could be privately operated but not for profit.
Let's Encrypt is a solid example of something you could reasonably model as "tragedy of the commons" (who is going to maintain all this certificate verification and issuance infrastructure?) but then it turns out the value of having it is a million times more than the cost of operating it, so it's quite sustainable given a modicum of donations.
Free software licenses are another example in this category. Software frequently has a much higher value than development cost and incremental improvements decentralize well, so a license that lets you use it for free but requires you to contribute back improvements tends to work well because then people see something that would work for them except for this one thing, and it's cheaper to add that themselves or pay someone to than to pay someone who has to develop the whole thing from scratch.
It has the same effect though. A few bad actors using this “free” thing can end up driving the cost up enough that Microsoft will have to start charging for it.
The jerks get their free things for a while, then it goes away for everyone.
I think the jerks are the ones who bought and enshittified GitHub after it had earned significant trust and become an important part of FOSS infrastructure.
Scoping it to a local maxima, the only thing worse than git is github. In an alternate universe hg won the clone wars and we are all better off for it.
Why do you blame MS for predictably doing what MS does, and not the people who sold that trust & FOSS infra to MS for a profit? Your blame seems misplaced.
And out of curiosity, aside from costing more for some people, what’s worse exactly? I’m not a heavy GitHub user, but I haven’t really noticed anything in the core functionality that would justify calling it enshittified.
Probably the worst thing MS did was kill GitHub’s nascent CI project and replace it with Azure DevOps. Though to be fair the fundamental flaws with that approach didn’t really become apparent for a few years. And GitHub’s feature development pace was far too slow compared to its competitors at the time. Of course GitHub used to be a lot more reliable…
Now they’re cramming in half baked AI stuff everywhere but that’s hardly a MS specific sin.
MS GitHub has been worse about DMCA and sanctioned country related takedowns than I remember pre acquisition GitHub being.
I don't blame them uniquely. I think it's a travesty the original GitHub sold out, but it's just as predictable. Giant corps will evilly make the line go up, individual regular people will have a finite amount of money for which they'll give up anything and everything.
As for how the site has become worse, plenty of others have already done a better job than I could there. Other people haven't noticed or don't care and that's ok too I guess.
Right. Microsoft could easily impose a transfer fee if over a certain amount that would allow “normal” OSS development of even popular software to happen without charge while imposing a cost to projects that try to use GitHub like a database.
I wouldn't call it "tragedy of the commons" because the very idea was coined as a strawman. As far as I'm concerned, the entire concept is a fallacy, and people should stop perpetuating it.
Commons would be if it's owned by nobody and everyone benefits from its existence.