A Problem in the Commons

According to Managing the Virtual Commons: Cooperation and Conflict in Computer Communities, by Peter Kollock and Marc Smith, newer forms of communication media, such as the internet, are leading to a greater amount of personal interaction via the computer. This form of communication levels the playing field, as social structures from the past are eliminated. These social structures are now obsolete because with this type of media everyone can participate in conversation and discussion and no longer makes it limited to the higher end of the social pyramid. Although this description sounds great, there is still a big problem communicating by this form, and that problem is free-riding.

One area on the internet where this problem of ‘free-riding’ exists is the Usenet. The Usenet consists of thousands of discussion groups ranging from any topic that you can think of. There is no central host that manages or organizes the Usenet, but is rather based on the users participation. After hearing about how the Usenet works, one question that is brought to mind is, “How can all of the users on the Usenet exist, with the ‘free-rider’ topic at hand?” Kollock and Smith discuss that, “Whenever one person cannot be excluded from the benefits that others provide, each person is motivated not to contribute to the joint effort, but to free-ride on the efforts of others. If all of the participants choose to free-ride, the collective benefit will not be produced.” (from Ostrom, 1990) This quote is explaining what the actual concern of free-riding on the internet is. Free-riding means that users that do not contribute to the discussion are taking information from other users and are not contributing any of their own. If this happens Usenet groups and other newsgroups will not reach the ultimate success that they could reach if everyone contributed.

After reading and discussing this article I feel that Kollock and Smith bring up a major point that I agree with. The problem with free-riding is extremely crucial to the success of a Usenet group. I have first hand experience with this and understand what they are speaking about. I am part of a sports blogging site, and many of us post useful information about baseball and football stats. But there are many more users of the site than those of us who actually post. Others are coming on to our site, and ‘free-riding’ off of our information and not contributing any of their own. In order for the site to reach maximum success everyone should post their own relevant information towards the topic.

From:
Kollock, Peter & Smith, Marc. (1996). Managing the virtual commons: Cooperation and conflict in computer communities. In Susan C. Herring (Ed.), Computer-mediated communication: Linguinstic, social and cross-cultural perspectives (pp. 109-128). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.