Information Cascades
Electronic Arts, otherwise known as EA, is a video game developer whose stock is currently plummeting. This is due to a large scale effort by the fans to fight back against their alleged greedy intentions concerning the content in their upcoming star wars game. This fan revolt is occurring on multiple social media platforms especially reddit. It is a reaction to the fact that most of the content of the game is locked and can only be unlocked by extensive gameplay (about 4,500 hours) or a lot of money ($2100). As a result, the fans have started a boycott of the game and all things EA which has continued to gain momentum. In fact, the most downvoted comment on reddit currently is from EA and about this very topic. Furthermore, 7 of the 10 most downvoted comments ever on the popular social network concern this issue. These comments have over one million dislikes, which is significantly more than anything else on the website. Due to the extreme momentum and widespread participation, EA released a statement apologizing over the game and promising to make changes. Meanwhile, their stock is falling and worrying investors.
This relates to what we have discussed in networks class because it is an example of a cascading network effect. Similar to the effect of the rich getting richer, this real world example shows how something can start off small before reaching a critical mass and then grow exponentially. It is like a snow ball which as it grows it is able to pick up more and more snow. Reddit is organized based on popularity of the pages, so as more and more people learned about this and downvoted the most disliked comment of all time it gained traction allowing even more people to see it and become involved. Therefore, this is an example of a cascading effect of exponential growth where the network of people involved can be estimated by a power law.