Date: April 26th, 2007 1:49 AM Author: mildly autistic theatre
You're an idiot if you'd stake your reputation for this piece of shit board and it's piece of shit administrators (ie: GTO....I won't pass judgement on rach at this point).
Date: April 26th, 2007 1:51 AM Author: pea-brained theater stage
do you live in China or something? Who is this "they?" Are you talking about the owners?
If GTO and Rach want to shut it down they will and they wont ask any of us so there will be no opportunity to stand up for shit, but nobody can really force them to do it at the end of the day.
There's a collective action problem because despite the (IMO) large benefit of having this board, the benefit is dispersed among the many people who come here, so each of us only benefits a little.
I said this is another thread, but there is only a very small incentive for any of us to post here (http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/I_did_it_for_the_lulz ) so it'd only take a small risk of negative consequences to send a chilling effect throughout the board.
Date: April 26th, 2007 1:58 AM Author: pea-brained theater stage
This is a serious post so please dont bash me for my ignorance.
I've never heard anyone call this a "collective action problem." Is this a term of art like "moral hazard" thats used a lot but that I was just to stupid to pickup in law school or did you just invent it now?
Date: April 26th, 2007 2:00 AM Author: Beady-eyed Dopamine
you should have learned about collective action problems in business organizations/corporations, at the very least
the easiest example is shareholder voting, if you've got a widely held, dispersed company none of the very small shareholders really stand to gain enough to make it worth their while to monitor the firm
I was trying to think if there was a more specific term for what I was describing, but I couldn't think of it. It's kind of like the flipside of free-riding, kind of like the prisoner's dilemma, is a bit related with externalities, but whatever, it's late and my command of buzzwords is a bit diminished. Regardless, it is certainly *a* collective action problem: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-rider/#1
This is more an economics thing than law school, although I think I owe my (obviously limited) knowledge of such things to a CLS course that is unfortunately no longer required (Regulatory State).
Tragedy of the commons is more how everybody exploits a resource because there's no single person would benefit from their use. Same basic idea of a collective action problem but not really what's going on here.
Date: April 26th, 2007 2:16 AM Author: walnut whorehouse windowlicker
moral hazard and tragedy of the commons aren't the same thing. tragedy of the commons specifically refers to communal property rights and overexploitation. moral hazard is what happens when you give people incentives to act badly - for instance, your car is insured, so you're not as careful when driving.
Date: April 26th, 2007 2:18 AM Author: walnut whorehouse windowlicker
if you step away from the textbook example of tragedy of the commons it is. in the tragedy of the commons case, no one has any incentive to stop exploiting a resource because they would lose even though society would be better off. here, no one would have any incentive to act because they would lose, while everyone else would be better off. the only difference i see is stopping action (t of c) and starting action (this board)
All collective action problems are basically variants of the prisoner's dilemma. So yes you can say that this is not too different from a tragedy of the commons, except the whole point of having the term "tragedy of the commons" is to talk about a specific situation, and that situation is not what we have here.
It's a little more like free-riding, which would be the case if one of us did try to stand up for the board but couldn't find anybody to go along with him or her. But again that's also a little different than this situation.