The Tragedy of the Digital Commons

Frog writes "The New York Times (reg. req'd) writes about a study by the Xerox PARC Internet Ecologies Area which shows that only a small percentage of Gnutella users actually share files -- the rest just take 'em. The researchers note it's 'hard to generate spontaneous cooperation in large anonymous groups.' As a consequence, the system has degraded performance, and is more vulnerable to censorship or legal action. Maybe the solution is to implement a market system for resource allocation, but how to prevent cheating?" Reminds me of the BBS days of file ratios - 'course then we'd just take an image, resize and upload it, so that idea didn't exactly work as intended.

Comments

Slow connection makes sharing hard

[cs668]

I think that faster net access would make it easier to share data instead of just downloading it.

My connection is slow enough that I can not share anything, but I would if I had DSL or Cablemodem access.

And this is some suprise?

[Dman33]

C'mon people! Do you really think that this is any shock? I could have told you that people would rather receive than give. Especially when it is anonymous.

I think a ratio type of thing would be a great idea, but how in the world can this be done? Obviously this is not too practicle in an anonymous situation; so is this the great paradox of anonymous vs quality?

In other words, if it is purely anonymous as many would insist it to be, then it will lack quality and usability by nature. So in order to have good quality, you have to sacrifice security?

Can anyone think of a better way?

This might be a solution.

[Apuleius]

Mojonation seems to address this problem. From their site:

Micropayments and Scalability Mojo Nation compensates users who provide the resources, content, and indexing services. Effectively preventing cheating, denial of service, and freeloading, Mojo Nation fosters an information market for all types of content. This is accomplished through a micropayment system which denominates the internal tokens, called Mojo, in the same resources needed to provide the services: disk space, bandwidth, and CPU cycles. In time you will be able to buy and sell these tokens, turning Mojo your earn into real dollars.

Of course, I've yet to use Napster or Gnutella, so who knows. But this thing gives you incentive to give as well as take.

Could it be the clients' fault?

[sandler]

I noticed that sharing seems to be a late "feature" in many clients. For example, the last version of Knapster I used and (I believe) the last version of gtk-gnutella I used both did not yet support uploading. In fact, the clients may never support it, and people may not want to upgrade to a new version that does. This is always going to be the least demanded feature, and since these types of services lend themselves to a plethora of Yet Another (tm) clients, this could be a significant problem.

NOT a tragedy, just another Keg party.

[tylerh]

Programmers know this as the "90/10" rule: 90% of the useful work will be done by 10% of the code

This applies to people as well. I helped organize keggers in college. A small number of us did the organizing/financing/clean up -- everyone else just showed up and partied. That was kind of the whole point. So this "ecology" result is NOT a tragedy of the commons, it' just a another keg party - and you know how hard those are to stop 8)

GO GNUTELLA

Napster?

[finkployd]

I guess the obvious conclusion is that people will not give away, only take from free sources. But then how do you explain napster? Even though I routinly hear that the quality of music is garbage ("it's all brittany spears and crap like that") I've found a wider range of music there than any other place I've ever been. From The Why Store to Bach and plenty of it.

I think it's a little early to declare gnutella in trouble, just wait till napster gets shut down, then watch the flood migrate over there.

Finkployd

The dark side of anonimity

[Kiwi]

Anonimity definitely has a dark side.

A few years ago, Time magazine did an excellent piece on the problems to today's society. One of the things they pointed out is that the privacy of a modern household has greatly increased the incidents of child abuse. In the society that we evolved in, one large factor that stopped people from abusing their child was the fact that there was no privacy--if you abuse your child, the whole village knew about it.

The anonimity of the internet causes similar problems.

Any system administrator knows that if they put any pornographic images on their web server, their machine or their machine's connection will quickly get overloaded. For example, one of my users put up pictures of attractive women. The women were not even naked, yet the server's connection was still overloaded.

I have heard it said that the most common term asked for in the leading search engines is "pornography". People who would normally be too embarassed to go in to a liquor store or a peep show have no problem getting porno on the net. The internet makes people do what they would not normally do.

While pornography is somewhat harmless, other activity on the internet isn't. The actions of the anonymous person who brought down Kiro5hin come to mind. As does the random bannings on many IRC channels (where the operators as often as not broke in to accounts or engaged in credit card fraud to get a system they could run a bot on to control the channel), the efforts people go to to cheat in online games, countless breakin attempts any experienced system administrator sees in their logs, the nonstop tide of spam, and so on. All of these are things that poeple do when they do not get a chance to look in the eyes of the person who they are harming with their selfish actions.

It does not surprise me that the internet is full of people who take but do not give back. Human nature has always had the takers who complain when the stuff they are not taking is not good enough for their selfish purposes, and the givers who get little in return for their giving except complaints from the takers. The anonimity of the internet makes this problem worse.

Anyway, that is my rant of the day. Time to go back to coding my current open-source project.

- Sam

Re:The dark side of anonimity

[puppet10]

It does not just allow people to engage in socially unaceptable acts, it allows people to engage in acts which are not locally acceptable.

The general attitude of people towards certain actions in New York is very different from for example a small southern community. The net allows people of like interests to connect with each other, even if the group is small and scattered, and find people who have similar views toward their actions.

This is a good thing for people who are not considered normal in their local communities, however those local communities may have a problem with this.

Mojo Nation

[Jim McCoy]

> I think a ratio type of thing would be a great
> idea, but how in the world can this be done?

It has already been done. The Mojo Nation system was designed as a way for people to exchange services using a micropayment system. This system is different from other micropayment systems because the "coins" are backed in digital resources. It is like the old upload and download ratios of BBS days. You contribute services to the system by "selling" to others and when you need services you "buy" them from other agents. Toss in a distributed, de-centralized data sharing services and you have a pretty cool little item. The coins are like tokens at an arcade, except those who contribute more than they consume end up with a surplus they might be able to sell later; greed is a powerful motivation to get people to

Cheating is controlled (or at least minimized) by using market-based mechanisms like reputations. By basing the service on something like a market it is possible for distrustful parties to conduct transactions and exchange services. Look around at any stable social structure and you will see a lot of the same techniques employed to fairly allocate resources and control parasites and cheaters.

jim mccoy

Money and trust

[raph]

There are two solutions, I think, to the tragedy of the commons. One is to pay people for their disk space and bandwidth. As several other comments have pointed out, this is exactly what Mojo Nation does, using "mojo" micropayment tokens as the currency. I've been playing with it, and though it's been a bumpy ride, it looks very promising. Check it out.

There is another solution, I think, which is using trust to define a community. The set of "Gnutella users" is too large and diffuse to actually define a community. Why should I donate my bandwidth for other people who I don't know and don't really care about?

If, on the other hand, I were sharing files with a much smaller group of people, many of whom I know personally, then it starts feeling more like a community. Of course I want my friends to be able to listen to the music I like.

I propose that the trust system as deployed on Advogato might be a good way to define these communities. Of course, I might be totally wrong about this as well. Only one way to find out :)

Incidentally, the way Mojo Nation is set up right now, it still has Tragedy of the Commons problems. Currently, you don't get mojo for uploading tasty content. In fact, you actually have to pay for the privilege. However, when you share a file, it's not a continual drain on your bandwidth (or diskspace, fwiw). The actual distribution is handled by "block servers", who do charge for their services.

Of course, the Mojo economy is still in its formative stages. I hope, and expect, that actual markets will develop for providing and identifying tasty content.

In any case, file sharing sure promises to be an interesting ride.

Marxist Leeching

[angst_ridden_hipster]

We used to paraphrase Marx's

"From each according to his ability,
to each according to his need."

into

"From each according to their assets,
to each according to their greed."

Of course, this was in our godless commie Warez swappin' Hotline-usin' phase...

In the long run, it's OK. There are 90% leeches. But the 10% who make up the providers is not always the same 10% of the people. Today's leech is tomorrow's provider, and vice versa. Sometimes.
It all tends to work out eventually.
-
bukra fil mish mish
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Monitor the Web, or Track your site!

Stealing the Web

[TrumpetPower!]

And, in a related and equally shocking development, other researchers discovered that 99% of people using the World Wide Web don't themselves create web pages but only view them. There can be only one result of this vast and tragically unballanced sucking of vital computer resources: the Imminent Death of the Internet.

b&

Uh oh, it's Huberman again

[Animats]

This article is more hype from Bernardo Huberman at PARC. Huberman is an economist of the libertarian persuasion. His answer to all problems is a market, as becomes obvious when you read his papers. His libertarian bias is so strong that he's written some very bad papers. Worse, some of them have been distributed widely because they said some things some major players wanted to hear, such as his claim that per-packet charging on the Internet was inevitable.

(This happens to bug me personally because he claims to have been the first to observe that the tragedy of the commons problem applies to Internet congestion. He wasn't; I was, in 1985. See RFC970)

As a previous poster noted, the default with Gnutella is not to share anything. That's why so few share. This isn't rocket science.