The Prisoner’s Dilemma of Online Content
https://medium.com/@MikeSturm/the-prisoners-dilemma-of-online-content-688cf65a2264
In the Medium article, “The Prisoner’s Dilemma of Online Content” Mike Sturm explains how the Prisoner’s Dilemma relates to online emails. His realization of this connection came when he signed up for the email list of a famous writer that he liked. Shortly after subscribing, Sturm was spammed with emails. As a result, he had to unsubscribe from the email list. He grew frustrated with the overwhelming number of emails and the inefficiency of receiving so many emails. After researching the growth of emails further, he discovered that there is a projection that the number of emails to be sent will increase by 54 billion in the next year. To put it simply, people are uploading more content to the internet than can possibly be read daily. There is an imbalance between the speed it takes to create an article and the speed it takes to read an article. Due to rapidly advancing technology, it has become easier to quickly publish articles. There is an arms race among publishers, however, publishing too many posts does have tradeoffs.
This article specifically mentions the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It also relates to the Nash equilibrium that was discussed in class. An equilibrium needs to be met and is strived for by the marketing team of many social media companies. This article explains how although there can be a better option if both players agreed upon a compromise, human nature does not allow this. Just as described in class, when the player picks the strategy that he desires most, he is actually hurting himself. There is a more ideal strategy, but this will never be achieved. Specific to this situation, the player needs to consider that by sending less emails, and potentially losing clients, the player can actually be helping himself. If all companies mutually agreed to send out less information, then the information they actually sent would be more effective. In other words, it would benefit all companies even more if they equally agreed to send out less emails. Relating this back to the prisoner’s dilemma, if a company scales back and sends less emails, they face the fear of other companies “testifying” against them. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the best situation is for both of the players to not confess, however they ultimately end up both confessing out of fear of the unknown of the other player. This fear in the email situation is that if a company decides to send out less emails, other companies could potentially continue to send more. The other companies would benefit from the company “staying silent.”