Free-rider

I have recently read an article by Peter Kollock and Marc Smith. The name of the article was called “Managing the Virtual Commons” and it was published in 1996. The article spoke mostly about the idea of free-riding, and related this idea to a computer-mediated communication system called Usenet. This communication system is basically a way for a large amount of people with the same interests to be able to exchange information, without ever having to meet face to face. People who are involved post comments, questions, responses, reactions, and responses to responses on a sort of Internet bulletin-board for everyone who is involved to see. Well, the point of this system is for everyone who is evolved to supply productive and useful information to everyone else in the community. So, as Killock and Smith mention in the article, not everyone has the same agenda. Many people use the information on the on the sites for their own advantage and do not supply and thing useful to the community. In my eyes this is going to happen no matter what, but I can see where this is very unfair to people who actually put in the work to be a constructive member in a society. Kollock and Smith use a metaphor as an easier way to look at the problem by relating it to cow pastures. Some communities have to use the same pastures to feed all of the herders’ cows. Now, it would be beneficial to them as individuals to have as many of their own cows as possible on the pasture at once, but if they don’t limit themselves, and don’t hold up their end of the bargain, then the pastures will be ruined. The relation between the two is that it would be more beneficial for someone to use Usenet for their own information and not have to put their work in. This brings me to something that I learned about the term free-rider. For me it meant someone just looking to use someone else to make life easier for them, but that isn’t always the case. From what I have read a free-rider can be someone who just uses Usenet to spam, talk about unrelated topics, or to do whatever they want with it besides what it is meant for. At first this didn’t make sense to me, but I now see how people doing things like this is using up space and wasting time that would otherwise be important to the serious user. So, the term free-rider can be used to describe people who are not looking to gain anything really, but people who just want purposely disrupt the order these communities. Later Kollock and Smith go one to give a few brief resolutions to these problems, but in the end I believe what they are trying to say is that there is no simple answer to any of these problems and the best we can do is keep trying new ideas. The way they describe it is as being a “double edge: monitoring the behavior of others becomes easier while sanctioning undesirable behavior becomes more difficult”.